Money for life

Money Forward, Inc., offers a wide variety of financial services, including personal finance management tools for individuals and B2B solutions for businesses and financial institutions. The company’s B2C service, also called Money Forward, is the most popular personal finance management application in Japan and serves 12 million consumers.

Fundamentally, Money Forward’s corporate view is that money is an essential tool for living—one that enables people to take care of themselves and their families, and helps them realize their dreams. The company’s vision is to become a financial platform that can serve the needs of all customers.

To accomplish this, Money Forward has prioritized operating a tech-forward business that engages a large team dedicated to the development of new services. In fact, engineers and designers comprise approximately 40% of the company’s employees.

Faster innovation requires a stronger process and tighter controls

To innovate at a rapid pace, Money Forward’s development team relies on agile scrum methodology. Breaking projects down into small increments enables engineers to make updates continuously. This approach calls upon development teams to support the day-to-day operations of the software they build instead of handing that responsibility off to another area within the organization.

In order for this structure to work, it’s important to delegate system privileges properly. This is where HashiCorp Terraform plays a key role at Money Forward. In 2017, Money Forward began using Terraform OSS to manage its Amazon Web Services (AWS) configurations. However, as the platform became widely adopted throughout the organization, the company encountered various operational issues.

For example, developers used different platform settings when running Terraform from their terminals. The lack of standardized procedures raised concerns and caused a decline in productivity.

At the same time, Money Forward faced mounting concerns about data security. The employees who managed cloud resources within Terraform OSS required high-level system privileges, which gave them access to sensitive data. Clearly, the company needed to implement tighter controls to protect sensitive customer data.

Recalling the days when Terraform use first started becoming ubiquitous across Money Forward, Mr. Riki Makita, infrastructure section, service platform division says, “We needed to create a common platform to manage our cloud operations.”

Once the company became aware of the urgency for improved data security and more precise controls over system privileges, its leaders considered various solutions. Products that allow developers access to sensitive customer information had to be eliminated from the list of available options. Ultimately, Money Forward chose Terraform Cloud for its ease of implementation and integration with GitHub.

Money Forward uses HashiCorp Terraform Cloud to automate and rapidly deploy infrastructure as code to provide B2C and B2B financial products and services.