How Itaú Unibanco Uses GitHub Copilot to Ship 93% Faster

Itaú Unibanco has grown into one of Latin America largest financial institutions through nearly a century of operations, but its engineering organization carried the weight of that history in the form of monolithic codebases and disparate DevOps tooling. Developers navigated more than a dozen separate tools daily—each with its own login, interface, and workflow—causing constant context-switching and slowing the iteration cycles the bank needed to remain competitive in a market increasingly challenged by digital-native fintechs.

The fragmented toolchain created compounding inefficiencies. Committing code took more than 15 minutes per cycle, deployments exceeded an hour and were prone to failure, and code written in one team was rarely reused by another. The architectural reality of a monolithic codebase further constrained the speed at which individual services could be tested, updated, and shipped independently.

Itaú leadership selected GitHub Enterprise (cloud-hosted) as the foundation for a DevSecOps transformation. The migration consolidated the entire toolchain: GitHub Actions replaced bespoke CI/CD pipelines, Dependabot automated dependency vulnerability scanning, and ServiceNow and OpenID Connect were integrated via GitHub Marketplace to preserve existing enterprise workflows. GitHub Copilot was deployed across the 17,240-seat organization to accelerate individual developer productivity by providing AI-assisted code completion across the bank codebase.

The results were measurable within the modernization program. Code commit time fell from more than 15 minutes to under 3 minutes—a 93% improvement. Deployment cycles compressed from over an hour to fewer than 10 minutes, a 68% speed increase, while deployment reliability improved by 60%. Code reuse across teams increased by 75%, reflecting the cultural shift toward shared libraries and standardized components that the unified platform enabled.

The transformation positioned Itaú to operate with the agility of a technology company while maintaining the compliance and governance requirements of a major regulated financial institution. By consolidating tooling and embedding AI assistance directly into the developer workflow, the bank has created a repeatable model for continuous modernization—one where velocity and reliability improve together rather than in opposition.