One of the world's largest digital banks extended a mature FinOps practice with PointFive, surfacing 200+ types of deep waste across AWS — and recovering the full annual cost of PointFive's contract within ten days of the POC.
Results at a Glance
- 10 days — annual contract value recovered during POC
- 200+ waste detection types surfaced across AWS
- Millions in realized annual cloud savings
- 45+ business units activated with engineering-owned remediation
Nubank
Nubank is one of the largest digital financial services platforms in the world, serving 131 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Headquartered in São Paulo, the company operates a large, fast-changing AWS environment that powers a broad portfolio of financial products and supports thousands of engineers working at the scale and pace of a regulated financial services business.
Where Visibility Stops Short
Nubank had spent years maturing its FinOps practice. A homegrown cost transparency platform — with full chargeback functionality — gave the organization deep visibility into spend across accounts, regions, and services. Budgeting and forecasting improved. Each of Nubank's 45+ business units had a dedicated Cost Champion responsible for managing cloud spend against budget. By any reasonable benchmark, this was a mature, operationalized FinOps practice.
But the same gap kept surfacing. Cost Champions could see costs rise, spikes appear, and budgets drift — but rarely the reasons behind them. Reviewing budgets showed trends, not causes. Without root cause, teams could only react.
And many of the inefficiencies Nubank suspected existed lived at a scale or specificity its existing tooling wasn't built to detect — too small to flag individually, too distributed to address centrally. The result: a long tail of waste that compounded silently across a complex, fast-moving environment.
From Cost Transparency to Root Cause
Nubank adopted PointFive to extend its existing FinOps stack, not replace it. The internal cost transparency platform remained the source of truth for reporting and chargebacks. PointFive focused on the layer Nubank's tooling didn't cover: identifying inefficiencies, attributing them to owners, and turning them into actionable remediation.
With read-only access to Nubank's AWS environment, PointFive's DeepWaste™ Detection Engine began surfacing more than 200 types of waste across configuration, architecture, data lifecycle, and application behavior — including misconfigured DynamoDB table classes, missing intelligent tiering on S3 buckets, suboptimal storage regions, inactive EBS volumes, and archival data stored in non-archival classes. Each opportunity arrived with estimated savings, risk level, remediation difficulty, and the technical context engineers needed to validate the issue.
Within ten days of starting the POC, Nubank had remediated enough opportunities to exceed the full annual cost of PointFive's contract.
The bigger story was what those ten days revealed: a long tail of opportunity types that would have been deprioritized at the individual resource level for being immaterial, but that — when surfaced and addressed at scale across the organization — added up to meaningful, sustained savings.
Routing Opportunities to the Right Teams
Onboarding took less than a week. Nubank shared its internal AWS tagging structure, and PointFive's customer success team mapped resources to the correct business units, Cost Champions, and engineering owners. Opportunities routed directly to accountable teams, without creating additional triage work for Nubank's FinOps function.
Engineers saw opportunities tied to their own resources, with the context needed to validate them and the ability to remediate through existing workflows in Jira and ServiceNow. Recommendations weren't generic configuration flags — each one explained the root cause, the cost impact, the suggested fix, and the associated risk.
That depth drove engagement. Engineers acted because the data was specific, contextualized, and independently validated.
Making Efficiency an Engineering Discipline
The result was a cultural shift. Cloud cost efficiency had historically competed with delivery, security, and compliance for engineering attention. With PointFive, it stopped being a centralized FinOps mandate handed down from above and became part of engineering's regular work — supported by clear ownership, trusted data, and straightforward remediation paths.
PointFive continues to detect more than 200 types of waste continuously across Nubank's environment, ensuring that as new services launch and architectures shift, inefficiencies don't accumulate undetected.
For Nubank, the meaningful change wasn't just the savings. It was the operating model: a mature FinOps practice extended with the root cause analysis and engineering-grade remediation context it had been missing — with cost efficiency now embedded in how engineering ships, instead of competing with it.
About PointFive
PointFive is the Cloud & AI Efficiency Engine. By combining a real-time cloud and infrastructure data fabric with AI-driven detection and guided remediation, PointFive transforms efficiency from a reporting exercise into an operational discipline. Customers achieve sustained improvements in cost, performance, reliability, and engineering accountability, at scale.
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