Skip to content
Cobalt Rentals

How Deutsche Vermögensberatung uses GitHub

Deutsche Vermögensberatung (DVAG) is Germany's largest autonomous financial consulting firm, founded in 1975. With over 18,500 full-time advisors serving more than 8 million customers, DVAG's business model centers on interpersonal relationships and holistic financial advisory services spanning insurance, retirement provision, and financial planning.

Overview

  • Seats: 450
  • Location: Frankfurt, Germany
  • Industry: Financial Services
  • Repositories: 1,100
  • Time saved with GitHub Actions reusable workflows: 98%
  • Reduction in leaked credentials: 95%

The Challenge

DVAG's multiple development teams built unique solutions for different layers of the business, each with its own infrastructure choices and practices. While this approach offered self-sufficiency, it created inefficiencies: teams built from scratch instead of reusing code, and each team maintained their own tech stacks—including servers and disaster recovery—diverting focus from customer needs.

"One of our main principles is that people need people," says Pascal Müller, head of IT Application Development & Strategy. "While our digital infrastructure enables our financial advisors to give the best services and advice for their customers, there is no replacement for human interaction. It's all about the person-to-person relationship. Technology is a key lever in enabling DVAG's financial advisors to focus on this relationship."

The Solution

DVAG's IT team adopted GitHub Enterprise to improve the customer experience across the entire application landscape and streamline development cycles. The platform team centralized bundled services—cloud services, Kubernetes, source control, CI/CD, and development tools—as a central platform service, allowing developer units to focus on application development instead of maintenance and operations.

"Being all in on GitHub makes it easier for our developers because they don't need to switch tools and can instead focus on delivering value," says Florian Koch, lead developer of the IT platform team. "They have one platform and UI where they can find everything—the source code, the workflows, the issues—all in one place and aren't distracted by routine tasks."

By moving from Jenkins to GitHub, DVAG reduced its application lifecycle management spend to zero and created a new full-time position focused on driving new opportunities with GitHub automations.

GitHub Actions and Reusable Workflows

DVAG's platform team built and automated reusable workflows with GitHub Actions that can be used across various teams. This eliminated the need for individual teams to build their own workflows, saving valuable developer time.

The setup process for workflows was reduced from four hours to five minutes—roughly 98% faster. Overall, the team estimates this has saved them 225 days in wait time since implementing reusable workflows.

"Reusable workflows give us a standard way of working that we can easily manage," says Koch. "I cannot imagine how we could standardize our workflows efficiently without GitHub Actions."

This time savings has translated directly into new features for customers. DVAG now offers financial advisors an optical character recognition (OCR) solution that automatically digitizes contract information, letting them focus on person-to-person conversations instead of manual data entry.

Security and Compliance

DVAG's developers rely on GitHub Advanced Security to save time while ensuring data safety. Before GitHub Enterprise, developers could accidentally publish shared credentials, requiring weeks or months to fix. Now, Secret Scanning detects credentials stored in repositories, while Push Protection prevents developers from publishing credentials in the first place by prohibiting the pushing of source code with recognized passwords, access tokens, or private keys.

Since implementing the feature, the team has seen a 95% decrease in security interventions for secure secret handling on the way to production.

"GitHub Advanced Security has solved the risk of leaked credentials," says Koch. "Now, developers are alerted to the problem before they can push code live. They have a direct feedback loop."

Dependabot has also helped DVAG ensure the security of its software supply chain by scanning and alerting developers to upstream security vulnerabilities in dependencies.

"With Dependabot, we see all the necessary updates to our code," says Koch. "It's really easy to use. You've got the issue and pull request, and with the correct workflows, the tests run automatically, and you can merge the fix."

Impact

From the efficiencies offered by GitHub Actions' reusable workflows to time saved with GitHub Advanced Security and Dependabot, GitHub has become key to DVAG's developers' continued success by empowering them to focus on features rather than manual, internal processes.

"We consider GitHub to be the most effective lever in providing our development teams with reliable and cutting-edge one-stop services," says Müller. "This is the sustainable foundation for our software development efforts to prioritize building effective and innovative features that enable our customers to focus on their customers on a person-to-person basis."