The Challenge

A Growing Challenger Bank‍

Judo’s technology strategy focuses on adapting systems that better enable the banker and customer relationship – a core competitive advantage for the challenger bank. As such, Judo consistently looks for ways to streamline operations and enhance efficiency, enabling Judo relationship bankers to do what they do best – spend time with their customers.

Judo sought out to onboard a robust DevOps solution in order to simplify processes and reduce the errors that the teams faced during Salesforce deployments. Releases required an increase in manual orchestration and coordination by the development team to manage issues. With limited team capacity, this led to delayed technology delivery.

Due to Judo’s exceptional growth, the bank had outgrown its existing deployment platforms and processes. The existing DevOps platform provided minimal ability to automate or improve deployment efficiency. Environments were not reliably synchronised meaning teams had to be closely coordinated or risk overwriting or causing conflicts with other team’s changes. Issues were often not identified until they were already in production.

As a result, deployments were infrequent and business-requested changes were delivered slowly. Hotfixes were ubiquitous and Judo required a team of people dedicated to troubleshooting, stabilising and supporting the Salesforce platform.

The time dedicated to the resolution of issues, orchestration of manual deployment activities, investigation of environment sync issues and rectification of conflicts and overwrites took time and focus away from valuable development that actually supported business outcomes.
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‍The Solution

Investing in Seamless Deployments

Judo Bank turned to Copado as the solution to their DevOps needs. Implementing Copado took careful planning and thoughtful implementation but enabled Judo to tackle both existing pain points and future DevOps ambitions.

The Copado implementation addressed three major DevOps goals:

‍Support Multiple Teams & Pipeline Paths. Implementing a DevOps platform that supports concurrent development teams with separate entry paths to the Production pipeline was an existing challenge, and one Copado handles natively.

‍Enable Automation. Automating Salesforce deployments went from a pipe dream to a possibility with Copado’s Salesforce-native automation capabilities built within the skillset of Judo’s existing Salesforce Development team.

‍Support nCino. Using nCino to enable various banking functionalities in Salesforce presented unique challenges for deployments due to its data-based configuration model. Copado Data Deployments resolve this and orchestrate nCino changes within Salesforce deployment activities seamlessly.

The onboarding of a skilled, in-house Salesforce team, along with a successful Copado implementation, set Judo on a path towards reliable and frequent releases.
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The Outcome

Balancing the DevOps Ledger at Judo Bank

Today at Judo Bank, deployments are faster, more frequent, and more reliable. Releases that used to take days now take hours, if not minutes, with large-scale production deployments completed in an afternoon.

“Previously, we needed to work in time to remediate issues in our deployment plans. Now our deployments are reliable and seamless, with zero downtime,” recalls Will Dinn, Judo Bank’s Salesforce Tech Lead.

Production releases used to be quarterly because the business could only tolerate so many periods of downtime and defects. Judo Bank now performs fortnightly Salesforce releases, without any business impact.

Additionally, production issues caused by deployments, environment management, resource conflicts or repo maintenance have gone to zero.

This has resulted in an uplift in the team’s capacity to work on meaningful business delivery.

“The platform is reliable and consistently available. We now have to intentionally publicise our deployments across the business because otherwise business users don’t notice them, which is an exceptional turnaround,” says Will.
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The Future

Saving Time and Refining Processes

“The team is now competent and comfortable with Copado. One of its major benefits for us is that it is native on the Salesforce platform meaning it can be extended and automated within a Salesforce Developers existing skillset,” comments Will.  “Copado provides a huge toolkit of DevOps capabilities, many of which we are exploring for further automation, efficiency and reliability.

The Judo Bank team is looking at expanding their usage of conflict resolution, data deployment, automation of manual tasks and autonomous interactions with ticket management. Will mentions, “we are also watching with keen interest the development of Copado AI functionality and look forward to the possibility of autonomous, agentic Salesforce DevOps.”
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