Gresham Technologies uses CircleCI to meet the needs of highly regulated financial industry customers

In financial services, agility is key

Financial services manage incredibly large volumes of data every day, which is why agile technology that scales is critical. Gresham provides its customers with flexible, scalable solutions, allowing them to focus on growth rather than development.

Gresham has grown its technology offerings through various acquisitions, and as a consequence found itself needing to standardize its software delivery, reduce the overhead of automation from its CI/CD provider, Jenkins, and strip out configuration complexity. At one point, Gresham had a group using Jenkins, another with their own CI/CD methods, and two more teams with yet a different workflow in place.

To overcome this challenge, Gresham realized that a single tool would help its software delivery team streamline and optimize their delivery practices — from improving speed and throughput, to reducing overhead caused by intermittent test failures. “We became a complex landscape,” said Marc Binck, Head of Cloud Services at Gresham. “It made sense to better integrate our teams to ensure we provide better customer solutions for their demanding and highly regulated financial markets.”

Lower costs, faster tests

Binck’s team realized that standardizing their CI/CD solution would be a wise long-term choice to improve delivery and lower the time and budgetary costs associated with it. One of Binck’s developers recommended CircleCI and after evaluating the solution with the proof-of-concept, Gresham chose CircleCI over other providers.

Gresham saw immediate improvements across key performance metrics, including a lower cost of execution and faster test speeds. Using CircleCI, Gresham achieved better standardization between its teams and improved knowledge transfer amongst developers.

“CI/CD is incredibly important to our business,” explains Binck. “We serve large enterprise clients on-site and in a cloud environment and we need to be agile in order to tailor our products to fit their needs.”

CircleCI means ultimate adaptability for Gresham’s product offerings

Binck was adamant that Gresham’s CI/CD solution be hosted and run in the cloud by the provider to avoid managing overhead. “CircleCI’s solution allowed more than sufficient flexibility for us,” Binck says. “This has been important as the products we offer our customers are very different and require a great deal of adaptability.”

Using CircleCI has also allowed Gresham to spend less on development overhead. It can be difficult to measure the value of new software delivery methods, and Binck’s team was able to prove cost efficiencies as part of their migration to CircleCI.

Binck is also impressed with the Advanced support plan offered by the company. “Advanced support and the related quick access to CircleCI resources has helped us avoid roadblocks during migration, which allows us to keep our developers’ confidence in the service and achieve quick wins.”

Gresham’s developers found an ‘aha’ moment triggering jobs from different workflow definitions, easily scripting build launches with all the required options they wanted. The simplicity of set-up, the range of executors, and the intuitive UI, all meant that Binck’s team found it easy to start building for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

“With CircleCI, we are rapidly standardizing how we deliver software on each project and on the various pipelines within each project.”

Marc Binck
Head of Cloud Services at Gresham Technologies

About Gresham Technologies

Gresham Technologies PLC (Gresham) specializes in providing real-time data integrity and control solutions to some of the world’s largest financial institutions, including UBS, Blackrock, and BNP Paribas. Based in London with offices in other parts of Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific, Gresham helps financial businesses operate so that the global economy keeps ticking.