Case Study: ABN AMRO achieves faster, more secure deployments and up to 25× higher velocity with Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle

Increased Velocity Increased Builds Decreased time to deploy

ABN AMRO, a large Dutch bank with about 22,000 employees and 5,000 IT staff, moved from a traditional waterfall model to agile delivery but faced long lead times, manual security checks and slow approval processes—deploying even a simple change could take five to six months. The closed open‑source component process and lack of automated quality gates created bottlenecks that prevented timely, secure software delivery and required a cultural transformation across the organization.

The bank implemented a CI/CD initiative with tooling pipelines (Jenkins, Bitbucket, Maven, SonarQube, Nexus Repository) and added Nexus Lifecycle for open‑source monitoring, plus Fortify, JIRA and XL Release for governance and releases. Nexus acts as the CI/CD handover and Lifecycle enforces build breakers and quality gates; combined with cultural change, this doubled-to-25x velocity improvements, moved internet/mobile releases from quarterly to biweekly, enabled many teams to deliver in one sprint, reduced test lead times, and measurably improved software quality, security and environment stability.

ABN AMRO

Stefan Simenon

Head of Centre of Expertise Software Development & Tooling