UK Bank Achieves £700K Annual Cost Savings and Boosts Developer Productivity through GitHub Migration with Coforge
Overview.
A prominent UK-based subsidiary of a Fortune 100 global bank sought a strategic partner to modernize its application development ecosystem by migrating from GitLab to GitHub, upgrading CI/CD pipelines, and updating core technologies and approached Coforge to lead the transformation. The initiative aimed to improve security, enhance developer experience, and reduce licensing costs.
The bank was experiencing frequent usability issues with GitLab, which directly impacted developer productivity. At the same time, Jenkins pipelines lacked robust monitoring and offered limited visibility into repository usage, technologies, and commit histories, hindering transparency and performance tracking.
The setup also suffered from limited automation, inconsistent standards, and high operational overhead. Compounding these challenges was the costly GitLab Premier license, amounting to nearly GBP 700K annually. Additionally, there was a pressing need to strengthen security and establish a standardized, group-wide toolchain to enable smoother collaboration and enforce compliance across product teams.
Solution.
Coforge led the end-to-end execution of this large-scale migration with precision and minimal disruption:
Comprehensive Assessment: Conducted detailed due diligence of existing systems, including an inventory of ~49,000 GitLab repositories, 4,000+ Jenkins pipelines, Java 11-based services, and Spring Boot 2.x components
Structured Migration Strategy: Planned and executed the migration of code repositories to GitHub, CI/CD pipelines to GitHub Actions, and upgrades to Java 17 and Spring Boot 3.x
Seamless Execution: Ensured zero disruption to ongoing development by validating components pre- and post-migration, enabling rapid developer onboarding and productivity
Automation and Standardization: Implemented uniform CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, significantly reducing maintenance needs
Security and Compliance: Enhanced security posture and ensured compliance with internal operational policies
The Impact.
~GBP 700K Annual Cost Savings by eliminating GitLab Premier licensing
Boosted Developer Productivity with improved experience and streamlined tooling
Higher Reusability across teams due to standardized components
Improved Security Posture through GitHub’s built-in security features
Greater Autonomy for Production Teams via self-service and reduced dependencies
Faster Deployment Cycles with GitHub Actions, enabling simplified and scalable workflows
Reduced Maintenance Overhead as GitHub Actions are supported by the open-source community
The bank significantly reduced operational costs by consolidating its application development toolchain and rationalizing legacy assets while laying the foundation for a scalable, developer-friendly, and security-compliant ecosystem. Coforge’s strategic execution empowered the bank to align with global engineering best practices and future-proof its DevOps capabilities.
