Financial ServicesSoftware Engineering

How Itaú Unibanco Uses GitHub Copilot to Ship 93% Faster

Itaú Unibanco, the largest private sector bank in Brazil with 17,000+ developer seats, migrated from a fragmented set of more than a dozen DevOps tools to a unified GitHub-based platform anchored by GitHub Copilot and GitHub Actions. The consolidation reduced code commit time by 93%, cut deployment time from over an hour to under 10 minutes, and improved deployment reliability by 60%.

Impact

93%

Code commit time reduction

68%

Deployment speed increase

60%

Deployment reliability improvement

75%

Code reuse increase

Challenge

Itaú Unibanco developers managed more than a dozen separate DevOps tools, causing excessive context-switching, 15-minute code commit cycles, hour-long deployments, and minimal code reuse across teams.

Solution

The bank consolidated onto GitHub Enterprise with GitHub Copilot for AI-assisted development, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, and Dependabot for security scanning, eliminating toolchain fragmentation across 17,240 seats.

Tools & Technologies

What Leaders Say

GitHub was key in our DevSecOps journey. Now we have more developer velocity to deliver our applications faster and meet our customers needs.

Gabriel Galeazzi, Software Engineering Specialist, Itaú Unibanco
Get the full context.

Sign up to read complete case studies, access detailed metrics, and unlock all use cases.

Full Story

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.

Similar Cases

W
WEX
~30%
developer productivity increase with github copilot

WEX, a global fintech company that processes payments for fleet management, employee benefits, and corporate spending, consolidated a fractured developer ecosystem of 300+ Azure DevOps organizations onto GitHub Enterprise and deployed GitHub Copilot across its engineering workforce of 1,700+. The result was approximately 30% higher developer productivity, ~60% ROI on Copilot licenses, and a 99% reduction in deployment cycle times.

Financial ServicesGAGitHub ActionsGEGitHub Enterprise
A
AstraZeneca
40%
developer velocity increase with github copilot

AstraZeneca, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, unified 5,000 developers and scientists onto GitHub Enterprise, automated CI/CD with GitHub Actions, and deployed GitHub Copilot — achieving a 40% increase in developer velocity in its pilot program and generating 9 to 10 additional hours of productive output per developer each week. With drug development timelines measured in decades, the company views even marginal acceleration as directly impacting patient outcomes.

HealthcareGAGitHub ActionsGEGitHub Enterprise
C
Cathay
63%
reduction in mean time to remediate security fixes

Cathay, the Hong Kong-based premium travel brand that operates Cathay Pacific airline across 100 destinations with 30,000+ employees, unified its development and security toolchain on GitHub Enterprise, deployed GitHub Copilot to 1,000+ developers, and embedded security scanning into daily workflows through GitHub Advanced Security. The result was a 63% reduction in mean time to remediate security vulnerabilities and a 40% year-over-year improvement in tech debt fixes.

RetailGAGitHub ActionsGEGitHub Enterprise
B
Block
75% saving 8-10+ hours
engineers saving time weekly

Block, the financial technology company behind Square, Cash App, and Afterpay, deployed Claude as the default model in its open-source AI agent, codename goose, running through the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. The system gives approximately 4,000 employees across 15 job profiles direct access to internal data, automated SQL generation, and AI-assisted code writing. Engineers report saving 8 to 10-plus hours per week, with goose adoption doubling within a single month.

Financial ServicesCGcodename gooseDDatabricks
SB
State Bank of India
64 million
app downloads

State Bank of India partnered with IBM to build YONO, a comprehensive mobile platform combining banking, financial services, and marketplace that achieved 64 million downloads and a USD 40-50 billion valuation.

Financial ServicesIAIBM API ConnectICIBM Consulting
BL
Bank Leumi
-60%
log detection and analysis time

Bank Leumi, Israel’s leading bank with more than 7,000 employees and $195 billion in assets, replaced its aging SIEM with Elastic Security to gain unified visibility across a cloud-and-on-premises infrastructure generating vast volumes of semi-structured data. By deploying Elastic Security alongside Kibana dashboards and MITRE ATT&CK-aligned detection rules, the bank cut log detection and analysis time by 60%, reduced security incident resolution time by 50%, and lowered total cost of ownership by 40%.

Financial ServicesESElastic SecurityEElasticsearch
TA
The AA
70%
routine query resolution time reduction

The Automobile Association (The AA), the UK’s leading roadside assistance provider serving 14 million members, integrated Databricks AI/BI Genie via Conversation APIs directly into Microsoft Teams. Non-technical staff can now query operational data in plain English within their existing communication platform, cutting routine query resolution time by up to 70% and freeing data specialists to focus on predictive modeling instead of fielding ad hoc report requests.

Financial ServicesDUDatabricks Unity CatalogDADatabricks AI/BI Genie
N
nCino
3.5x
faster document filing

nCino, a cloud-based banking platform serving 2,800+ financial institutions, built domain-specific AI tools on Databricks and AWS leveraging 13 years of proprietary banking data. Their Banking Advisor delivers role-based AI insights natively within the platform, while Continuous Credit Monitoring automates risk alerts across the loan lifecycle. The result is 3.5x faster document processing and a shift from reactive to proactive portfolio management.

Financial ServicesAAWSSSalesforce