Itaú Unibanco has selected Harness to standardise software delivery across its engineering organisation.
Brazil-based Itaú Unibanco will deploy the platform developed by US-based Harness as part of a wider plan to change how its engineers build and ship software. The agreement covers the bank’s entire engineering organisation, where thousands of engineers develop software used by millions of customers across digital banking, payments, and platform services. The bank aims to expand its use of generative AI in this work while meeting the governance and resilience requirements that apply to a global financial institution.
Governed templates and automated controls
Under the arrangement, Itaú will standardise its delivery processes on governed templates, automated verification, and policy-driven controls. According to the announcement, this is intended to give the bank’s engineering teams faster builds, automated rollbacks, and a uniform deployment experience across its main programming languages and cloud environments. Security, audit, and compliance requirements tied to operating as a regulated bank are to be built into each pipeline by default rather than applied separately.
Carlos Eduardo Mazzei, CTO at Itaú Unibanco, argued that software will form the basis of banking’s future and that institutions will need to combine speed with control.
Phased expansion across the delivery lifecycle
The rollout will begin with an initial adoption phase, with Itaú planning to extend its use of Harness across the full software delivery lifecycle in the following months. This would create a single foundation that gives engineering leaders consistent visibility, control, and cost oversight from code to production. The stated objective is to reduce the time and effort needed to move code from commit to production, allowing engineers to concentrate on building the products that set the bank apart.
The roadmap is also linked to the bank’s broader effort to apply AI across its engineering processes, aiming to increase the speed and quality of software development. André Palma, Director of Platform Engineering at Itaú Unibanco, noted that shorter product cycles require technology to keep pace, adding that the bank regularly assesses capabilities that could support how its teams build and deliver software.
The Harness platform
Harness’s platform comprises Software Delivery, Security Testing, Runtime Protection, and Cost Management Agents, which are connected through a layer called the Agent Harness. This layer shares context drawn from the company’s Software Delivery Knowledge Graph and governs each action through identity, permissions, policy, and verification controls.
The company states that it works with more than 1,000 engineering organisations, including United Airlines, Morningstar, and Choice Hotels. It reports that customers have accelerated releases by up to 75%, reduced cloud costs by up to 60%, and improved efficiency by up to ten times.
