Developer Experience

How ClearRoute Is Helping CBA Unlock an Estimated $100M+ in Savings by Transforming Developer Experience

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is one of the nation’s most recognisable financial institutions — but like many large enterprises, it faces legacy complexity, fragmented engineering practices, and high operational overhead.

CBA is taking bold action to modernise how innovation happens across its 15,000+ engineers — and ClearRoute is at the heart of that journey.

By focusing on Developer Experience (DevEx) and aligning teams to golden paths, the transformation is expected to unlock over $100 million in productivity gains, platform consolidation, and reduced developer toil.

The Challenge: Fragmented Engineering and Expensive Inefficiency

For years, CBA had invested in modernisation efforts — from Agile to DevOps to cloud migration. But these initiatives had delivered incremental improvements, not enterprise-wide change.

Key issues included:

  • Isolated engineering teams leading to redundant efforts and increased expenses
  • Manual compliance and testing workflows slowing down releases
  • Disconnected platforms and frameworks reducing developer effectiveness
  • High setup times (up to a month) before developers could begin real work
  • An inability to scale innovation across thousands of teams

These inefficiencies contributed to delayed time-to-market, rising operational risk, and attrition among frustrated engineers. In short: innovation was expensive and slow.

The Plan: Platform-Led, Developer-Centric Transformation

ClearRoute is working alongside CBA to fundamentally redesign how software is built, tested, and released — with developers at the centre.

1. A Unified DevEx Platform

At the core is the DevEx platform — a centralised engineering portal providing:

  • Golden paths with built-in security, observability, and test automation
  • Pre-approved templates and reusable components
  • Self-service environments and automated onboarding
  • Seamless integration with CBA’s governance and compliance layers

Estimated impact:

  • 99.95% reduction in setup/config time per app (from 4+ weeks to under 5 mins)
  • $30M+ saved annually through reduced engineering friction and faster time to market

2. Phased Rollout for Fastest ROI

ClearRoute is applying a targeted rollout, starting with .NET applications — enabling scalable blueprints to be proven, measured, and expanded to other archetypes.

This approach ensures:

  • Minimal disruption to delivery teams
  • Measurable ROI in the first 6 months
  • Rapid scaling of patterns that work

Estimated impact:

  • 3x improvement in release frequency
  • $15M+ annual value from faster delivery and fewer defects in production

3. An Engineering Insights Platform

Alongside DevEx, ClearRoute is building an analytics layer to measure engineering effectiveness across all teams. This includes:

  • Dashboards tracking peer review times, deployment health, test coverage, etc.
  • Gamification to promote best practice adoption
  • Insight-led coaching to target areas with the highest opportunity for uplift

Estimated impact:

  • 94% faster peer reviews (from 6 days to <3 hours)
  • $25M+ annual saving through faster decision-making and fewer release blockers

4. A Stronger Talent Brand

CBA’s investment in modern platforms, tools, and practices isn’t just about delivery — it’s also about attracting and retaining world-class engineering talent.

By removing the need for hyperspecialised, bespoke workflows, the bank:

  • Broadens its talent pool
  • Lowers hiring costs
  • Improves employee satisfaction and retention

Estimated impact:

  • $10M+ annual value through reduced attrition and lower recruitment costs

The Path Ahead

ClearRoute’s engagement with CBA is designed to deliver both short-term wins and long-term transformation. Over the next 12–18 months, we anticipate:

  1. Over $100 million in cumulative value unlocked
  2. 30–50% improvement in time to market for new digital products
  3. A consistent, compliant engineering baseline adopted across squads
  4. An empowered developer culture driving innovation at scale

The Bottom Line

CBA isn’t just modernising platforms. It’s reimagining how software gets built. With ClearRoute’s developer-centric approach and platform thinking, the bank is laying the groundwork for exponential gains in efficiency, quality, and speed.

This is the new model for enterprise transformation — and it starts with DevEx.

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