Introduction

Waveapps is a Toronto-based SaaS suite that helps freelancers and small businesses manage invoicing, payments, accounting and payroll from a single, mostly free workspace. Since joining H&R Block's product family in 2019, it has grown into one of the most widely used all-in-one finance platforms for the micro-business segment. Bloomteq developed and maintains Wave's Financial Accounts service, enabling unified multi-provider account management at scale.

Challenge and Scope

Wave's Financial Accounts service needed to scale from a single payment provider to a fully multi-provider architecture while maintaining data integrity and zero downtime for its large base of small business customers. Key challenges included: Migrating from WorldPay to Adyen without service disruption (shadow migrations). Managing complex token-based account linking across multiple financial providers. Building reliable gRPC/Kafka integrations for real-time data synchronisation. Ensuring full audit logging and compliance across all financial account operations. Delivering real-time monitoring and automated workflows in a cloud-native environment.

Approach, Solution and Outcome

Bloomteq's team is embedded as a core engineering unit within Wave's product organisation, taking ownership of the Financial Accounts service end-to-end. The approach centred on:

- Incremental migration strategy using shadow migrations to de-risk provider transitions.

- Event-driven design using Kafka to decouple account operations from downstream consumers.

- Container-first deployment on Okteto/Docker to enable consistent environment management.

Solution

- Developed and maintains Wave's Financial Accounts service for unified multi-provider account management.

- Executed WorldPay to Adyen migration using shadow migration techniques, ensuring zero data loss.

- Implemented token-based account linking to securely manage financial provider credentials.

- Built gRPC/Kafka integrations for high-throughput, real-time data pipelines.

- Deployed automated workflows that reduce manual account reconciliation overhead.

- Established full audit logging across all account operations for compliance and traceability.

- Set up real-time monitoring to proactively detect and resolve account service anomalies.

Outcome

- Wave's Financial Accounts service now supports multiple payment providers from a single unified platform.

- The shadow migration approach delivered provider transitions with no customer-facing downtime.

- Automated workflows significantly reduced operational effort for account management tasks.

- Real-time monitoring and audit logging improved Wave's compliance posture and incident response speed.

- The scalable gRPC/Kafka architecture supports Wave's continued growth in the micro-business segment.

Business Impact

Bloomteq's engineering work on the Financial Accounts service has strengthened Wave's competitive position by enabling it to work with best-in-class payment providers while maintaining a seamless experience for its users. The multi-provider architecture reduces dependency on any single financial institution, improving platform resilience. Automated workflows and real-time monitoring directly reduce operational costs, while robust audit logging supports Wave's regulatory compliance requirements across its global customer base.