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How WEX uses GitHub

WEX standardized development on GitHub to drive 30% higher developer productivity.

Overview

Location: Portland, Maine
Number of Seats: 1,700+
Industry: Financial Services

WEX is a global fintech company that processes payments for customers across fleet management, employee benefits, and corporate spending. A decade of rapid growth created disparate developer environments spread across the engineering organization, which limited cross-team collaboration and led to higher cognitive load. By centralizing their entire development infrastructure on GitHub's platform, WEX gave their developers a faster, more efficient way to build systems that power global financial technology solutions.

Key Results

  • ~30% productivity lift with GitHub Copilot
  • ~60% ROI with GitHub Copilot
  • ~99% faster deployment cycles with GitHub Actions

Migrating from Azure DevOps to GitHub

Source code and pipelines were fractured across disparate platforms—including Azure DevOps, GitLab, and Jenkins—creating silos and governance gaps. At one point, more than 300 Azure DevOps organizations existed, many unmanaged and inaccessible. The engineering organization, led by Christian Oestreich, VP of Platform Engineering, and Erik Englund, Director of Development Enablement, lacked the visibility needed to collaborate effectively.

"WEX had organizations within organizations and teams within teams," said Englund. "Over-organizing subdivided the enterprise—which made it harder to search, discover, and share code."

Centralizing on GitHub gave the team full transparency into where their code lived and unlocked incredible velocity for the migration itself. To date, WEX has moved roughly 2,000 repositories and re-written or modernized nearly 1,000 pipelines.

This speed was made possible by a library of standardized, reusable building blocks the team created using GitHub Actions. By plugging in pre-built templates rather than configuring every pipeline from scratch, the team cut migration time down significantly. Moving a repository—which previously took days or even weeks—can now be completed in less than a day.

"We needed an ecosystem where developers could easily find, understand, and build on each other's work. GitHub's platform made that possible," said Oestreich.

Reducing Friction with GitHub Enterprise

Before using GitHub Enterprise, the WEX development team faced numerous onboarding challenges. Developers had to create and self-manage their GitHub accounts along with multiple credentials, a clunky process that wasted time and led to inconsistent organizational access. Offboarding was just as inconsistent—there were no standard processes for when developers left the company.

After unifying onto GitHub and integrating with Enterprise Managed Users (EMU), the process became much smoother. Identities are now enterprise-managed, reducing friction for developers and giving administrators proper governance. Users can self-onboard onto GitHub, and the team has eliminated administrative burden by making it easy to access these tools and workflows.

"Now, when we onboard a user with GitHub Enterprise Cloud and EMU, WEX owns and administers that account, and when the user leaves the enterprise, we retain the assets. That's been a huge win," said Oestreich.

Accelerating Developer Productivity with GitHub Copilot

Before GitHub, WEX developers were spending valuable time reinventing pipelines and performing repetitive tasks—all things that could be delegated to an AI tool like GitHub Copilot so developers could focus on higher value work.

Developers are driving productivity by using Copilot to help write and refactor code, generate tests, and accelerate new application development. Two-thirds of developers are now using Copilot, including the organization's most active contributors. WEX has expanded adoption by making Copilot Code Review a default across every repository. Developers are also heavily utilizing Agent Mode and the Coding Agent to drive autonomy, helping WEX see a huge lift in deployments, with ~30% more code shipped.

"With GitHub Copilot, we're seeing an almost instantaneous return on investment," said Oestreich. "GitHub Copilot has been transformative for WEX. More and more of our developers are using it to drive value every day."

Building Sustainable, Reusable Developer Pipelines

Writing functional workflows and compliance checks previously consumed days of developer time, diverting focus from higher-value initiatives. The WEX team built reusable, governed pipelines using GitHub's ecosystem, automating processes like artifact creation, container deployment, and security integration. Routine tasks that once stalled productivity can now be executed in minutes, eliminating repetitive setup and accelerating delivery.

For example, deploying a cloud application—a process that previously took months—can now be completed in about an hour thanks to GitHub runners and automation from GitHub Actions. "That's a ~99% reduction," notes Oestreich. "We now have a rich, fully functional, fully governed pipeline ecosystem. It's been one of our biggest wins within GitHub."

Building reusable workflows has streamlined governance compliance by embedding enterprise standards—such as OIDC integration for secure, token-free authentication—directly into the process, giving teams confidence that every workflow meets required security and quality checks.

Reusable pipelines also help highlight inefficiencies. "If developers experience friction when adopting reusable workflows, it shows that the code probably wasn't written with versioning, scanning, or packaging in mind," says Englund. Building these in GitHub showed what code needed refactoring and illustrates how the team can improve in the future.

WEX now uses GitHub as the execution engine for all automation—from Terraform and Ansible to custom scripts—providing consistency and security across teams.

Improved Productivity by Unifying on GitHub

The WEX team went from fragmented developer environments to a fully integrated, AI-powered ecosystem on GitHub. Building a strong foundation of transparent workflows and clear organizational structures has helped WEX eliminate unnecessary friction so its teams can work more efficiently and deliver higher-quality code.

"By migrating from Azure DevOps, we've unified development on GitHub's platform and augmented it with AI. We've unlocked a pace of innovation unlike anything in our 40-year history," said Oestreich. "GitHub now powers the engine of our development organization, and it's transformed how fast we can deliver."

With one streamlined ecosystem driving speed, productivity, and collaboration, WEX developers can focus on what matters most: building great solutions.