Jack Henry drives innovation in financial services

With LaunchDarkly feature flags, Jack Henry can reduce the inherent operational risks associated with ongoing enhancement releases affecting its high-volume payment solutions that are currently processing  more than $200 billion in monthly transactions. Feature flags also enable instant rollback of releases if needed and optimizes development with robust testing, while increasing the speed and productivity benefits generated by reducing inter-team dependencies with trunk-based development. 

Jack Henry™ (Nasdaq: JKHY) is a well-rounded financial technology company that strengthens connections between financial institutions and the people and businesses they serve. We are an S&P 500 company that prioritizes openness, collaboration, and user centricity – offering banks and credit unions a vibrant ecosystem of internally developed modern capabilities as well as the ability to integrate with leading fintechs. For more than 46 years, Jack Henry has provided technology solutions to enable clients to innovate faster, strategically differentiate, and successfully compete while serving the evolving needs of their accountholders. We empower approximately 8,000 clients with people-inspired innovation, personal service, and insight-driven solutions that help reduce the barriers to financial health. Additional information is available at www.jackhenry.com.

Jack Henry provides an array of industry-leading  financial services and transaction processing that approximately 8,000 diverse banks and credit unions rely on daily, so the company has a fundamental commitment to supporting each client with frequent, high-quality releases. 

With multiple development teams working in tandem, the company needed a more seamless and efficient way to expedite development, avoid release delays, and perform rollbacks of production code  in the rare instances they were necessary.

The teams at Jack Henry needed a way to mitigate the inherent risks with ongoing releases — especially those impacting its mission-critical payment solutions— while eliminating entire environments and virtual servers that were no longer needed and added unnecessary complications to the development processes. All of these needs could be met with trunk-based development, which was truly enabled by LaunchDarkly.

Jack Henry’s teams now use LaunchDarkly for trunk-based development, which increases speed and productivity, reduces inter-team dependencies, and prevents the need for rollbacks due to improved testing practices it affords for teams. The switch to trunk-based development has enabled a true separation between release and deployment, fostering releases with reduced risk to quality.

“That's why we really push the use of feature flags for all of our teams—not just in production, but in development too,” says Jeff Skees, Staff Software Engineer. “If they roll something out that’s not quite ready yet, and someone raises their hand and says, ‘Hey, you broke my app,’ they can just toggle that flag off. No harm. No foul.”

“LaunchDarkly enabled us to go from a system stabilization project to a collective, overall stabilization mindset" proclaimed Steve Hackett, Software Engineering Senior Manager in Jack Henry Payments.

The benefits of trunk-based development and improved testing have not just positively impacted end-users—the teams at Jack Henry now have a framework for upgrading a number of processes and improving systems.  

Mark Davis, Senior DevOps Engineer in Jack Henry Payments, explains an example:

“Our old email program was single-threaded and running as a Windows service. Our new email program was written as a .NET Core application in containers in Kubernetes for scalability. Plus, this new program has flags that can toggle on/off the services in development, and set which email types the new monitor picks up. This allowed a phased rollout, one email type at a time.”

It’s also important to note that Jack Henry’s use of LaunchDarkly has provided an additional benefit in terms of cost savings. As part of the company’s trunk-based development initiative, it has consolidated 102 virtual servers, which equates to savings of up to approximately $4,000 per month. 

As you might expect, the many benefits gained since implementing LaunchDarkly have Jack Henry engineers exploring more ways to use it across various teams and platforms. And we’re certainly more than excited to see what they come up with next.