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How Emirates NBD uses GitHub

Emirates NBD, a leading banking group in the MENAT (Middle East, North Africa, and Türkiye) region, delivers cutting-edge digital banking with GitHub Enterprise and GitHub Copilot. With USD 235 billion in assets and over 30,000 employees, the bank serves over 9 million active customers.

Key Results

  • ~20% productivity boost for developers using GitHub Copilot
  • 20% improvement in overall code quality with GitHub Copilot
  • 2x increase in monthly deployments

1800+ developers | Dubai, UAE

The Challenge

Emirates NBD's tooling for code management and development hindered their ability to innovate quickly. 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.

The Solution

Emirates NBD chose GitHub Enterprise Cloud to centralize source code and foster an innersource culture. The platform significantly improved efficiency, time-to-market, code quality, and developer morale.

GitHub Copilot Transforms Development

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.

GitHub Copilot creates an instant feedback loop for developers, giving them new ways to solve problems. 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.

Emirates NBD found that GitHub Copilot not only accelerates developer productivity by up to 20% in complex tasks, but often takes over routine coding tasks entirely. GitHub Copilot's high-quality code suggestions have enabled Emirates NBD's engineers to double their in-production deployments month-over-month.

Streamlined Onboarding

Besides faster time-to-market and better code quality, GitHub has made it much easier for Emirates NBD to onboard new developers. "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, the learning curve for developers is rather short.

Building an Innersource Culture

Adopting GitHub Enterprise Cloud accelerated Emirates NBD's transformation. 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."

Business Impact

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.

"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.