Legacy Limitations and New Expectations: Why CI/CD is Critical for Financial Services

Financial services organizations are under intense pressure to deliver software that is not only high-quality and feature-rich, but also secure, compliant, and fast to market. The industry is in the midst of a seismic shift: where traditional, monolithic application stacks must evolve to support modern architectures, multi-cloud environments, and an ever-growing list of regulatory requirements.

This transition often introduces new complications. Legacy systems, siloed processes, and inconsistent tooling lead to failed, insecure, or non-auditable releases.

In the face of growing regulatory demands and technological complexity, financial services firms like TransUnion are turning to enterprise-scale CI/CD solutions to modernize operations, drive developer productivity, and accelerate innovation. 

TransUnion, a global information and insights company, prioritized modernizing its software delivery pipeline beyond just a tooling upgrade. It was a fundamental transformation of how software is built, tested, and released across the enterprise.

With development teams spread across multiple geographies, maintaining consistency, governance, and efficiency in software delivery was a critical challenge.

Initially, TransUnion relied on Jenkins, the popular open-source automation server, for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). Jenkins provided a strong foundation, but as TransUnion scaled, its limitations became more apparent. 

Like many financial service companies, they needed a purpose-built, enterprise-grade CI/CD platform, one that could support rapid growth, reduce manual maintenance, and deliver stability, compliance, and performance at scale.

To modernize its software delivery approach, TransUnion implemented CloudBees CI. Built specifically for large enterprises, CloudBees brought scalability, resilience, and governance to the company’s CI/CD pipelines. This transition optimized the company’s software delivery processes, minimizing manual effort and boosting efficiency. Features like High Availability, Horizontal Scability, Configuration as Code, and Pipeline Templates enabled TransUnion to standardize processes while supporting rapid growth.

The impact was immediate. Between 2020 and 2021, TransUnion more than doubled the number of software projects supported by CloudBees, growing from approximately 1,400 to over 3,500 projects. As the company scaled its use of CloudBees, it saw a 3.5x increase in feature deployments.

What was once a fragmented, manual environment evolved into a streamlined and predictable pipeline that supported fast, secure, and compliant releases, on a global scale.

Strong developer experience is a key factor in driving innovation. It is known that developers spend less time doing what they love to do: code. Less than 30% of developer time is spent coding. The rest of that time is spent context-switching between tools and systems, waiting for “things” to happen. 

As TransUnion refined its delivery pipelines, the team recognized another key opportunity: improving the developer experience.

TransUnion established a “global developer experience program” focused on giving engineers the right tools, reducing friction, and fostering psychological safety across teams.

By adopting CloudBees, TransUnion removed many traditional roadblocks to software development. Developers can now focus on innovation rather than administrative overhead, boosting morale and retention.

With a scalable CI/CD in place and developer experience on the rise, TransUnion is now looking to the future: intelligent automation. Managing thousands of deployments across globally distributed teams demands more than just robust pipelines, it requires smart, proactive systems that can anticipate and optimize in real-time.

This is where AI will play a transformative role in CI/CD pipelines. With the opportunity to integrate AI-powered analytics and automation, financial services firms can:

• Enhance Predictive Analytics: Analyze past deployment patterns to predict potential failures before they occur, minimizing downtime and improving reliability. Analytics dashboards that show, for example:

  • DORA Metrics (Mean time to Recover/Failure, Deployment frequency)

  • Software Delivery Metrics (Pull requests, Code Churn, Commit volume)

  • Security Insights (CVE count and severity, fix status)

• AI-Augmented Quality Assurance: AI-driven testing tools can identify defects earlier in the development lifecycle, reducing manual testing efforts and accelerating releases. For example:

  • Predictive Test Selection

  • Test Scoring and Prioritization

• Optimize Infrastructure Management: AI-driven resource allocation ensures optimal utilization of computing resources, reducing costs and improving performance.

TransUnion is actively exploring AI-powered CI/CD enhancements to further streamline its development pipeline without disrupting developer workflows.

The financial services industry will continue to evolve with advancements in cloud computing, AI, and automation. TransUnion is committed to pushing the boundaries of CI/CD by:

• Integrating AI and Machine Learning into the CI/CD process to drive more intelligent automation and predictive analytics.

• Enhancing quality gating mechanisms to ensure smoother, high-quality software releases.

• Strengthening governance and security across software delivery pipelines to align with regulatory compliance and risk management requirements.

TransUnion’s success with CloudBees highlights the power of how a modern CI/CD solution with flexible, integrated capabilities can accelerate software delivery and improve the developer experience. 

Retaining and empowering top engineering talent remains central to TransUnion’s CI/CD strategy. By focusing on enablement - giving developers the tools, autonomy, and support they need—the organization continues to foster a culture of innovation and long-term success.

Read more on how TransUnion partnered with CloudBees to scale enterprise CI/CD in a regulated environment.

As financial services companies embrace digital transformation, leveraging scalable CI/CD solutions will be key to maintaining a competitive edge. Organizations can ensure a future of innovation, efficiency, and high-quality software delivery by integrating AI, automating quality control, and focusing on developer enablement.