Nubank
Nubank is one of the world's largest independent digital banks, serving over 100 million customers across Latin America. Headquartered in Brazil, the company operates a large and complex AWS environment that supports a broad portfolio of financial products and more than 7,000 engineers.
A Mature FinOps Practice Hit a Ceiling
Nubank spent years maturing its FinOps practice through internal initiatives and with the support of a well known Cloud Cost Management tool. The platform delivered meaningful value. Nubank gained visibility into cloud spend across accounts, regions, and services, improved budgeting and forecasting accuracy, and tracked cost units across the organization.
Each of Nubank's 50 business units had a dedicated Cost Champion responsible for managing cloud spend against budget. From a FinOps perspective, Nubank had done what many organizations are still working toward.
Despite this maturity, gaps remained. Cost Champions could see rising costs, spikes, and budget deviations, but they could not explain why those changes occurred. Reviewing budgets from current and prior years showed trends, not causes. Without root cause, teams could only react.
Suspected inefficiencies inside AWS were difficult to validate. Central Platform teams occasionally raised concerns, such as the use of incorrect database table classes, but those concerns often stalled. Without clear context, ownership, or an easy way to engage engineering teams, recommendations were hard to act on.
It became clear that Nubank was not missing visibility. It was missing causality, ownership, and a practical path to remediation.
Extending FinOps Beyond Visibility
Nubank adopted PointFive to extend its existing tooling, not replace it. The CCM platform remained the source of truth for cost transparency and reporting. PointFive focused on identifying inefficiencies and turning them into actionable remediation.
Once PointFive received read-only access to Nubank's AWS environment, it began detecting more than 200 types of waste across configuration, architecture, data lifecycle, and application behavior. Each opportunity appeared with estimated savings, risk level, remediation difficulty, and the full context required to validate the issue.
The results were immediate. By following PointFive's remediation workflows, Nubank engineers remediated enough waste to exceed the annual cost of PointFive in ten days (while still in the proof of concept).
Making Efficiency Actionable at Scale
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. This ensured opportunities routed directly to accountable teams without creating additional work for Nubank.
PointFive's approach shifted efficiency ownership from a centralized FinOps function to the teams responsible for the infrastructure. Engineers saw opportunities tied directly to their resources, along with the context needed to validate them quickly and the ability to remediate through existing workflows in tools like Jira and ServiceNow.
Trust played a critical role in adoption. Engineers trusted PointFive's recommendations because they were specific, contextualized, and independently validated. Each opportunity clearly explained the root cause, the cost impact, the recommended remediation, and the associated risk.
Measurable Outcomes
Since adopting PointFive, Nubank has reduced its annual cloud spend by millions and lowered monthly cloud costs by approximately 5 percent. These results came not from one time cost cutting, but from sustained remediation at scale.
PointFive continues to detect more than 200 types of waste across Nubank's AWS environment, including misconfigured DynamoDB table storage classes, missing intelligent tiering on S3 buckets, suboptimal storage regions, inactive EBS volumes, and non archival data stored in non archival classes.
With more than 7,000 engineers, cost efficiency had historically competed with delivery, security, and compliance priorities. PointFive changed that dynamic. Engineers now engage directly with efficiency opportunities as part of their daily work, supported by clear ownership, trusted data, and simple remediation paths.
By extending its existing FinOps tooling with PointFive, Nubank moved beyond cost visibility to continuous cloud efficiency, where every team can see, validate, and resolve inefficiencies at speed.
