Blackhawk Network
Blackhawk Network (BHN) is a global leader in branded payment solutions and a major player in the financial services industry. Operating a complex, frequently changing cloud infrastructure across EC2, RDS, and S3, BHN supports a large engineering organization that needed better visibility, accountability, and a clear path to cloud efficiency.
A reporting and accountability gap
BHN had invested in FinOps tooling, but existing solutions couldn't keep up. Legacy platforms and native cloud reporting tools lacked flexible data segmentation, making it difficult to produce monthly spend reports broken down by business unit. Managing costs across EC2, RDS, and S3 with infrastructure that changed frequently made accurate attribution even harder. Attributing cloud costs to individual engineers and building a genuine sense of ownership was effectively impossible.
Suspected inefficiencies existed across their infrastructure, but without actionable insights or clear attribution, recommendations rarely reached the engineers who could act on them. FinOps remained a centralized function, disconnected from the teams responsible for the infrastructure.
Extending FinOps into engineering
BHN adopted PointFive to unify cloud reporting and optimization on a single platform. Rather than replacing existing workflows, PointFive extended them, bringing together the analytics and opportunity detection that BHN's existing tools couldn't deliver.
PointFive's Analytics module gave BHN a fully integrated BI tool to build custom dashboards and reports, tracking present and past monthly costs attributed to specific teams. The Opportunities engine surfaced detailed, contextualized remediation recommendations, going beyond basic configuration flags to provide in-depth analysis, remediation workflows, and forecasted outcomes.
Onboarding was fast. Engineers were mapped directly to their cloud resources, and opportunities routed to the right owners without creating additional overhead for the FinOps team.
Making efficiency an engineering responsibility
The depth of PointFive's recommendations drove immediate buy-in from engineering. Engineers weren't just handed a list of issues, they received the root cause, cost impact, remediation steps, and the context needed to make informed decisions and act with confidence.
This shifted cost efficiency from a reporting exercise to an engineering discipline. Teams engaged directly with optimization opportunities as part of their regular work, supported by clear ownership and trusted, actionable data.
Measurable outcomes
Since adopting PointFive, BHN generates accurate monthly cloud spend reports used in engineering and executive meetings. Engineers across the organization actively participate in cost optimization, with a consistent pipeline of opportunities to eliminate waste and build a long-term efficiency roadmap.
By unifying reporting and optimization under a single platform, BHN moved beyond visibility to a culture of proactive, engineering-led cloud efficiency, without disrupting day-to-day operations.
About PointFive
PointFive's platform has two complementary products: PointFive OS for infrastructure efficiency across cloud, data, and AI, and TokenShift for AI-agent visibility, governance, and optimization. PointFive OS supports investigation and customer-defined automation; infrastructure changes use customer-authorized write access, under the approval model each customer chooses.
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