Affordable online banking provides more than just a safe place to store money. It empowers individuals to enhance their economic well-being and take charge of their financial futures. Neon Bank tackles the financial exclusion of millions of underbanked Brazilians by eliminating traditional barriers to banking, such as distance from brick-and-mortar branches and unaffordable fee structures. As an online bank with zero transaction fees, Neon Bank gives Brazilians access to financial services from anywhere.

Neon Bank has seen tremendous growth since introducing Brazil's first virtual card in 2016, and now serves more than 23 million customers. Despite this success, the company remains committed to its mission of prioritizing the needs of everyday people. "Our intention is to remove the inequality from the traditional, structured banking system and simplify it for everyone," elaborates Diovane Rinaldin, Neon Bank's Manager of Information Technology Engineering. This unwavering focus on accessibility and inclusivity has been a key driver of Neon Bank's growth and has encouraged the company to pursue innovative solutions to enhance its software development processes and better serve its customers.

Neon Bank's complex and disconnected tech stack, which spanned BitBucket, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GoCD, JIRA, Sonarqube, and Veracode, severely hampered the company’s ability to build innovative features. Managing this collection of tooling proved difficult to govern and even more challenging to optimize, and the company found it increasingly difficult to keep pace with its own rapid growth. By partnering with GitHub, Neon Bank consolidated its tech stack and accelerated its software development lifecycle across its entire organization. 

Before this partnership, it was a challenge to deploy new features to production, taking some teams up to six hours to complete. However, the company reduced deployment times to just minutes by adopting GitHub Enterprise and migrating its infrastructure-as-code pipelines from GitLab and GoCD to GitHub Actions. “I saw the worst application from build to deployment taking six hours,” says Rinaldin, “With GitHub, it takes 10 to 15 minutes. The improvement has been remarkable.” The organization’s development teams saw a massive efficiency boost and regained countless hours, allowing them to focus on future initiatives.

I saw the worst application from build to deployment taking six hours. With GitHub Actions, it takes 10-15 minutes. The improvement has been remarkable.

Previously, both BitBucket and GoCD had created issues with uptime and unplanned maintenance, which frequently added hours to the company's development lifecycle. Migrating the company’s source code and CI/CD pipeline to GitHub not only saved time but also improved security. “With Bitbucket, we were unable to solve persistent security issues that limited visibility in key areas. Now with GitHub, we no longer have to spend time trying to solve these challenges. It just works,“ explains Rinaldin.

GitHub Actions also bolstered Neon Bank's innersource development approach, promoting cross-team collaboration, facilitating knowledge exchange, and elevating code quality. The company’s developers can now build apps in Angular, .NET, Python, and TypeScript, using reusable workflows, as well as run mutation tests and mocks to ensure consistent practices across the organization. This consistency streamlines code reuse, eliminates potential discrepancies, and enhances security. Neon Bank saves further developer time by using prebuilt Actions from the GitHub Actions marketplace to integrate with its numerous external platforms, which include Sonarqube, AWS, Kafka, Rabbit, Vault, and Kubernetes. Now, Neon Bank's developers can focus on comprehensive testing and optimizing functionality, rather than activities like the deployment, execution, or maintenance of third-party tooling.

With its DevOps platform now operating smoothly, Neon Bank has been able to cultivate an innersource culture throughout the organization. For example, it has improved developer collaboration and productivity by creating new repos for individual projects and arranging developers into teams, which streamlined the development process and provided a single interface for code and pipelines. The company has also significantly simplified project management by using GitHub Issues to track project requirements, code enhancements, and bug fixes, and better collaborate.

I feel a lot more comfortable going to sleep knowing I'm not going to get a call in the middle of the night saying somebody had a problem with a deployment. GitHub provides this peace of mind.

By consolidating its tech stack on GitHub Enterprise, Neon Bank overcame the challenges to innovation that came with its rapid growth. The company was able to improve its development processes and build a stronger innersource culture, resulting in faster deployments, better collaboration, and simplified project management. Now, Rinaldin said, "I feel a lot more comfortable going to sleep knowing I'm not going to get a call in the middle of the night saying somebody had a problem with a deployment. GitHub provides this peace of mind."