Gentera partnered with Harness to modernize and standardize software delivery across its growing financial services platform. By consolidating nearly 600 fragmented pipelines and adopting Harness across CI/CD, Code Repository, IaCM, and Database DevOps, Gentera automated governance, reduced database rollback failures from 19% to under 1%, and shortened loan approval cycles from weeks to days—helping deliver credit to underserved communities faster and more reliably.
Key Takeaway
Gentera's mission is financial inclusion — bringing credit, savings, insurance, and payments to communities across Mexico and Peru that traditional banks have historically excluded. Delivering on that mission at scale depends on a modern software delivery platform. Before Harness, Gentera's DevOps environment was fragmented across nearly 600 pipelines and disconnected tools, slowing releases and making governance hard to enforce consistently. By standardizing on Harness across CI/CD, Code Repository, Infrastructure as Code Management, and Database DevOps, Gentera cut its pipeline count by roughly two-thirds, dropped its database rollback failure rate from 19% to under 1%, and reduced loan approval cycles from about two weeks to about three days — putting credit into customers' hands faster.
About Gentera
Gentera is a financial services company focused on expanding access to credit, savings, insurance, and means of payment for underserved communities across Mexico and Peru. Today, Gentera employs more than 28,000 people serving more than 6.7 million clients, delivering credit to rural and underserved communities.
"For our customers, access to credit is not just a financial transaction. It can be the difference between growing a small business, buying inventory, investing in a farm, or covering an unexpected expense. Harness helps us get that credit into their hands faster."
— Brando Hernandez Zazueta, CTO, Gentera
As Gentera digitized its lending platform to reach more customers faster, it became clear that the software delivery environment behind that platform needed to change too.
The Challenge: Fragmented Delivery Was Slowing Financial Inclusion
600 Pipelines, One Bottleneck
Gentera's development environment was fragmented across multiple tools and workflows: Jenkins handled CI/CD, code repositories lived in a separate system, security validation was manual and disconnected, and approvals were spread across multiple systems. With 500+ developers and nearly 600 pipelines, releases were difficult to manage — Jenkins plugin failures could halt releases for days, and release cycles stretched to 1–2 weeks.
Cloud Growth Without Guardrails
At the same time, Gentera's platform teams were modernizing infrastructure as part of a broader move to GCP, Kubernetes, and microservices. That growth outpaced governance: teams lacked a consistent, policy-checked way to provision infrastructure across projects.
Manual Rollbacks on Customer-Facing Systems
For customer-facing systems like the Gestión Digital platform, database schema changes carried real delivery risk. Changes ran through a custom Liquibase pipeline, separate from application delivery, with no native governance or built-in rollback steps, so recovery from a failed change was manual and dependent on individual intervention — a costly gap on systems customers rely on directly.
The Solution: One Governed Platform for Every Layer of Delivery
"As a financial institution, we can't choose between speed and control. We need both. Harness is what lets us have it."
— Brando Hernandez Zazueta, CTO, Gentera
Golden Pipelines Replace Pipeline Sprawl
Gentera consolidated its code repositories and standardized CI/CD on Harness, replacing nearly 600 fragmented pipelines with four "golden pipeline" templates and automated, governed release pipelines.
"Now we're able to work from standardized pipelines, and our security checks happen automatically instead of stopping teams to ask for approval. That foundation is what lets us move faster for the people we serve."
— Brando Hernandez Zazueta, CTO, Gentera
That standardization also cut cognitive load for developers. Instead of learning a different tool and approval path for every release, teams now work from one consistent path to production — leaving more time for the work that actually reaches customers.
Infrastructure as Code, Governed by Default
Using Harness Infrastructure as Code Management (IaCM) with Terraform, Gentera built standardized archetypes for GKE Kubernetes clusters, automated provisioning, and applied OPA policy checks and cost comparison to every infrastructure change — so teams can move fast without losing control.
Database Changes Become Auditable, Not Risky
Gentera adopted Harness Database DevOps across its platform. Mobile Banking was built on native DBD steps from day one; Gestión Digital migrated from custom pipeline scripts to native DBD, unlocking built-in OPA-based policy enforcement. Because database changes now run in the same pipeline as application delivery, a failed release can be rolled back as a single unit, recovering the application and database together with built-in rollback steps and no manual unwinding. Every schema change now produces an automated, auditable trail for Internal Control, Information Security, and Data Governance.
The Results: Faster Releases, Stronger Governance, Faster Credit
Faster, More Consistent Delivery
- Pipelines: ~600 fragmented pipelines → ~200 standardized pipelines built on four golden templates
- Approvals: manual, disconnected sign-offs → automated security and compliance checks built into every pipeline
- Developer experience: less time navigating tools and approval paths, more time building customer-facing services
Safer Database Changes
- Rollback failure rate: 19% → under 1%
- Recovery: manual, individual-intervention → automated, auditable, self-service
Faster Financial Inclusion
- Loan approval cycle: ~2 weeks → ~3 days
Faster access to working capital for farmers, rural workers, and small entrepreneurs across Mexico
"Harness helped us say yes faster. Multiply that across every farmer and shop owner we serve, and you start to see the real impact of this work."
— Brando Hernandez Zazueta, CTO, Gentera
As Gentera keeps building on this foundation, the goal stays the same: get credit into the hands of underserved communities faster, safely, and at scale.
