CBA was stuck in a cycle of slow releases, quality issues, and frustrated engineers — and despite years of effort, things weren’t changing fast enough.
Until ClearRoute’s developer-centric framework for change and CBA’s engineering teams came together to transform vicious cycle into virtuous circle, unlocking CBA’s potential to innovate at pace.
Like all major financial institutions, CBA had known for years they needed to ship products faster. But with thousands of engineering teams, implementing change was a huge challenge.
At the same time, regulatory scrutiny meant compliance was centre-stage — but heavy-handed manual compliance processes were cumbersome and slow.
CBA had embarked on several discrete transformation initiatives, like Cloud, Agile, DevOps, and SRE. But incremental gains weren’t laddering into the organisation-wide speed increase needed.
CBA was stuck in a tug-of-war; one that stalled agility, drove-up overheads, and left engineers spinning their wheels. Or kicking into gear elsewhere, leaving teams short-staffed.
CBA needed to transform how innovation happened. They needed a holistic, connected approach that transcended siloes and got everyone singing from the same hymn-sheet.
Developer experience was the glue they needed.
To move forwards CBA needed alignment. We needed to put the hub in the wheel, to connect thousands of isolated teams. And we needed to bake-in cast-iron automated security and testing that kept everyone safe.
To create a common language, ClearRoute designed and built a DevEx platform from the ground-up: a unified portal that serves as a ‘homepage’ for CBA’s 15,000+ engineers.
Providing golden paths, automated workflows, self-service capabilities, pre-built components, standardised blueprints and unified best practice, the platform reduces cognitive load and creates a centralised vision, framework, and processes for engineering.
In essence, the platform makes it easy and fast for developers to do the right things, without the need for organisation-wide training, rollout, or forced adoption. It’s the foundation for safer, faster releases, decreasing time to ship products and minimising operational overhead post-deployment.
Enterprise transformations fail when they bite off more than they can chew, galvanising little change and much cynicism.
ClearRoute take a phased approach to change, to achieve tangible value fast. For CBA that meant working archetype by archetype (starting with .NET), narrowing down the tech stacks where scalable blueprints would have the biggest impact for the most developers, fastest.
In parallel with the DevEx platform, our team created an engineering insights platform to collect and surface data across CBA’s engineering function.
The insights platform introduces transparency and empowers data-driven decision-making. Crucially, it also creates accountability — which ladders into all-important behaviour and culture change.
Alongside the DevEx platform, this is the cornerstone of compounding impact, as teams are both empowered and incentivised to work towards the right goals.
CBA started seeing tangible value within six months of designing the DevEx platform, with ROI snowballing fast as adoption spread.
Devs used to spend a month configuring and setting up before they could even start developing features. The developer experience platform now orchestrates this within five minutes, with intelligent scanning, security, testing and post-deployment actions automatically baked in. That’s a time-saving of 99.95% per application.
It’s the blueprint for more productive engineers, better, safer products, and happier customers.
Slow, inconsistent peer reviews were a major obstacle to launching features safely. We needed to change behaviour and culture, not just process –that’s what the engineering insights platform powered.
The platform puts simple, intuitive peer review data dashboards at teams’ fingertips, introducing accountability and visibility. Add a sprinkle of gamification, and peer reviews reduced from an average of 6 days to under three hours – 94% faster.
Reviews have now become a brilliant touchpoint for collaboration and engagement, driving a knock-on impact for upskilling and retaining junior engineers.
Great engineers choose environments where they can do great work: CBA now offer that. It’s a huge cultural shift from the “nothing gets done in big banking” mantra, towards an agile, pacey workplace where engineers can make an impact.
Plus, the bank no longer needs hyperspecialised talent to manage endless special use cases, widening the talent pool and making recruitment easier, cheaper, and faster.
CBA now has an engineering talent brand that’s a springboard — not a blocker — for innovation.
