How WEX Achieved 30% Developer Productivity Gains with GitHub Copilot

WEX processes payments across three major verticals — fleet management, employee benefits, and corporate spending — for customers worldwide. The company has grown rapidly over four decades, but that growth came with a hidden cost: every acquisition and team expansion left behind its own tooling footprint. By the time the engineering organization decided to act, developers were navigating more than 300 Azure DevOps organizations, many of them unmanaged and inaccessible, alongside GitLab and Jenkins instances that had accumulated over years of unchecked sprawl.

The fragmentation hit developers in two ways. First, it was nearly impossible to find and reuse code that colleagues had already built. Second, the governance gaps meant no one had full visibility into what was in production, who owned it, or whether security standards were being applied consistently. Onboarding new engineers required creating and managing multiple credentials across platforms, and offboarding was equally chaotic — departed employees often retained access longer than they should have.

The engineering leadership team, led by VP of Platform Engineering Christian Oestreich and Director of Development Enablement Erik Englund, chose GitHub Enterprise as the single destination for all development activity. Migration began immediately: WEX moved approximately 2,000 repositories and rewrote or modernized nearly 1,000 pipelines. A library of reusable GitHub Actions templates made the migration itself faster — a repository move that previously took days now completes in under a day. Enterprise Managed Users (EMU) solved the identity problem, giving administrators full control over account provisioning and ensuring clean offboarding. Simultaneously, the team adopted GitHub Copilot and enabled self-service onboarding so developers could start using AI assistance without waiting for IT approval.

The numbers from Copilot adoption are striking. With two-thirds of developers actively using it — including the organization’s most prolific contributors — WEX is seeing approximately 30% more code shipped and a ~60% ROI on Copilot licenses, with costs recovering almost immediately. The automation gains from GitHub Actions are equally significant: deploying a cloud application that previously required months of setup now completes in roughly one hour, a roughly 99% reduction in cycle time. The team has since made Copilot Code Review a default across every repository and is actively using Agent Mode and the Coding Agent for autonomous development tasks.

The consolidation has done more than improve individual developer speed — it has changed how WEX thinks about engineering as a competitive capability. Oestreich described it as unlocking a pace of innovation unlike anything the company has seen in its 40-year history. With reusable, governed pipelines embedding security standards like OIDC token-free authentication directly into every workflow, WEX can now deliver fleet cards, benefits products, and payment solutions faster while maintaining the compliance posture required of a global fintech.