UBS streamlines software product development with GitLab

Investment bank UBS has signed a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement with GitLab to drive cloud development.

Through the collaboration, the bank will aim to use DevOps to accelerate the speed of software engineering by the end of 2021. It said its goal was to produce high-quality software rapidly to support clients, which would help the bank stay ahead of rivals as well as break down the barriers between coding, testing and deployment. 

UBS said agile and DevOps were crucial to enable the business to develop modern, cloud-based and service-oriented applications.

The collaboration with GitLab is part of UBS’s DevCloud strategy, in which the bank plans to support the entire software development process using a single DevOps platform.

“Agile and DevOps, in conjunction with our cloud journey, are the way to offer even more dynamic, higher quality and more efficient software engineering. This is the essence of our DevCloud, which we want to be the best developer experience in the market,” said Mike Dargan, head of UBS Group Technology.

“GitLab will be a fundamental part of our cloud journey, and thus accelerate our strategy. With GitLab, we leapfrog many of our competitors and break the barriers between coding, testing and deployment. In addition, we expect this technology to enable us to engineer our cloud-native applications, as well as our traditional banking applications, from one platform.”

“Agile and DevOps, in conjunction with our cloud journey, are the way to offer more dynamic, higher quality and more efficient software engineering. This is the essence of our DevCloud, which we want to be the best developer experience in the market”

The agreement will see custom extensions from UBS added to GitLab’s DevOps platform cloud. According to UBS, these will enable the bank to redefine its software developer and engineering experience. For instance, it said product owners from the different businesses, software developers, as well as test and tech operators, would have access to the same information and collaborate closely to enable the bank to meet and excel its clients’ needs.

GitLab offers a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, which it claims eliminates communications between different tools and decreases maintenance costs. It said developers, operators and auditors have access to the same information and have the ability to drill from a global view to a single repository.

UBS and GitLab are members of the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FinOS), which is focused on tackling common industry challenges and driving innovation in the finance sector through the use of open source code. Along with UBS and GitLab, members include Citi, JP Morgan, Nomura, Morgan Stanley and HSBC. 

FinOS aims to promote standardisation to promote industry-wide adoption of security frameworks and financial tools across the banking sector. These standards will be sharable with other financial industries and are expected to contribute to the overall development of banking of the future, as well as increasing efficiency and cooperation within the ecosystem.