Digital transformation continues to raise expectations for fast, personalized services in every online experience. Nowhere is this more obvious than digital banking, which we rely on for everything from paying bills and transferring money to eCommerce and investing. Emirates NBD, a leading banking group in the MENAT (Middle East, North Africa, and Türkiye) region, is leading the way in meeting this demand by empowering their customers with advanced solutions to everyday, and not so every day, banking needs. With USD 235 billion in assets and over 30,000 employees from more than 90 nationalities, Emirates NBD is bringing a new standard in digital banking to over 9 million active customers.

Emirates NBD strives to go beyond being an industry leader, consistently pushing the boundaries of what can be accomplished in digital banking. To optimize innovation, the company embarked on “Leap”, a transformation journey with a highly advanced digital agenda that included uniting developers on a single, cloud-native development platform. To achieve this goal, Emirates NBD chose GitHub.

Embracing GitHub Copilot has facilitated the company’s digital transformation. “With GitHub Copilot, our engineers can solve our most complex problems without needing to leave their development environment,” said Saud Al Dhawyani, Group Chief Platforms Officer at Emirates NBD. Sometimes, these advanced solutions are the direct result of GitHub Copilot’s code suggestions. Other times, they are the result of the company’s developers working with an ever-present AI pair programmer that understands code context and suggests alternate solutions.

With GitHub Copilot, our engineers can solve our most complex problems without needing to leave their development environment.

“GitHub Copilot creates an instant feedback loop for developers, giving them new ways to solve problems,” explained Al Dhawyani. Developers of all experience levels recognize these benefits. Junior developers find GitHub Copilot useful for tasks they are still learning, while senior developers value its ability to suggest modern approaches to update methods they have not revisited in a while. Al Dhawyani describes this as “GitHub Copilot helping overcome autopilot.”

Emirates NBD found that GitHub Copilot not only accelerates their developers' productivity by up to 20% in complex tasks, but often takes over routine coding tasks entirely. Additionally, it improves the company's code quality by 20%. GitHub Copilot’s high-quality code suggestions have enabled Emirates NBD's engineers to double their in-production deployments month-over-month. Alongside GitHub Copilot, developers have seen increased efficiencies and experienced new learnings.

Besides faster time-to-market and better code quality, GitHub has made it much easier for Emirates NBD to onboard new developers. Unlike with other internal tools, the company does not need to offer special training for GitHub. “Because GitHub is a market leader, new employees are already familiar and can start using it right away,” remarked Ali Rey, Group Head of Technology Platforms at Emirates NBD. Even with GitHub Copilot being a relatively new product, Al Dhawyani has found that the learning curve for developers is rather short. “Getting up to speed with GitHub Copilot is actually quite simple, and the developers who have been using it for a while have fallen in love with it,” he said.

Adopting GitHub Enterprise Cloud accelerated Emirates NBD’s transformation, Rey explained. “We wanted to consolidate to the best of breed source control platform and needed a partner that would help propel us forward.” Standardizing on GitHub gave the company’s developers a single source of truth and accelerated code sharing and collaboration. An innersource culture quickly blossomed within the developer organization, resulting in increased adherence to best practices and less duplicative code creation.

While they started small, with just 10 GitHub users, Emirates NBD’s emphasis on innersourcing led them to become the largest GitHub user base in the Middle East, with over 800 active developers on the platform. “GitHub helped us move from a strategy of ‘build many, use once’ to ‘build once, use many’” Rey explained. “Before, there would be four different ways our developers would solve a simple problem. Now, thanks to centralization on GitHub, we are using existing solutions rather than recreating the same solutions over and over again.”

Thanks to GitHub, we have moved the Bank entirely onto the cloud, become more innovative, and are providing new services to our customers faster than ever.

Emirates NBD has seen a solid rise in their fundamental business metrics since moving to GitHub. “Our time-to-market and ability to fix issues is faster than ever,” said Rey. “Previously, a five-minute quick fix would take days to push through our review and sign-off processes.” For such a large company, this has a powerful ripple effect: It improves time-to-market, accelerates productivity, and boosts developer morale, with developers reporting less frustration and improved job satisfaction.

Since embarking on Leap and implementing GitHub's platform, Emirates NBD has streamlined their development workflows, empowered their developers to collaborate more efficiently, and accelerated innovation across the business. “Thanks to GitHub and GitHub Copilot, we have moved the Bank entirely onto the cloud, become more innovative, and are providing new services to our customers faster than ever,” said Al Dhawyani.