WEX is a global fintech company that processes payments for customers across the areas of fleet management, employee benefits and corporate spending.  But a decade of rapid growth created disparate developer environments spread across the company’s 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.

Leveraging GitHub’s AI-powered platform, WEX’s developers used GitHub Copilot to achieve results like ~30% higher developer productivity, ~99% faster deployment cycles, better quality code, and a smoother onboarding process–outcomes that enable WEX to deliver better value to customers faster. 

Migrating from Azure DevOps to GitHub 

Because source code and pipelines were fractured across disparate platforms—including Azure DevOps, GitLab, and Jenkins—WEX developers faced silos, and the engineering organization suffered from governance gaps. At one point, more than 300 Azure DevOps orgs 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.” 

Frustrated by a lack of visibility that impeded developer productivity and innovation, the team knew it was time to find a more suitable platform: one that would allow them to speed up time to market and deliver an even better developer experience.

We needed an ecosystem where developers could easily find, understand, and build on each other’s work. GitHub’s platform made that possible. - Christian Oestreich, VP of Platform Engineering 

Centralizing on GitHub gave the team full transparency into where their code lived, but it also 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 simply plugging in these 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.

With these changes, instead of spending countless hours trying to figure out where their code even lives, WEX developers now have the visibility they need to focus on tasks that drive value for the business. What’s more, this strong foundation has allowed them to enable AI and agent-driven experiences to further streamline workflows, reduce context switching, and improve collaboration and efficiency.

How consolidating on GitHub Enterprise helped reduce friction

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. The team needed a way to keep accounts provisioned correctly and consistently, with no lingering access or loose ends.

But after unifying onto GitHub and integrating with Enterprise Managed Users (EMU), the process is much smoother.

“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.” – Christian Oestreich, VP of Platform Engineering 

Today, identities are 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. Unification didn’t just reduce red tape and headaches—it created one single source of truth.

Accelerating developer productivity with GitHub Copilot

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

Englund and Oestreich set up several enablement sessions to get developers up to speed and demonstrate how the ecosystem has evolved. They also enabled self-service onboarding to remove as much administrative burden as possible.

Developers are driving productivity by using Copilot to help write and refactor code, generate tests, and accelerate new application development. And it’s paying off: the team is seeing an estimated 60% ROI, with licenses paying for themselves almost immediately.

"With GitHub Copilot, we’re seeing an almost instantaneous return on investment." - Christian Oestreich, VP of Platform Engineering

Today, two-thirds of developers are using Copilot—including the organization's most active contributors. WEX has since 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.

"GitHub Copilot has been transformative for WEX. More and more of our developers are using it to drive value every day." - Christian Oestreich, VP of Platform Engineering

Building sustainable, reusable developer pipelines 

Writing functional workflows and compliance checks previously consumed days of developer time, diverting focus from higher-value initiatives. To address this, 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 Christian Oestreich, VP of Platform Engineering. “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—organizations within organizations and teams within teams—to a fully integrated, AI-powered ecosystem on GitHub. 

“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. ” - Christian Oestreich, VP of Platform Engineering

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. And it’s paid off—GitHub Copilot and GitHub Enterprise are helping WEX developers improve processes across the board to ship business fuel cards, employee benefits, and payment solutions faster than ever. 

“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, ” says 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.