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Itaú Unibanco to Standardize AI-Era Software Delivery on Harness

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Harness announced on November 12, 2026 that Itaú Unibanco has selected its platform to change how software is built and shipped across the bank’s engineering organization. The deployment will begin with an initial adoption phase, followed by planned broader adoption.

Harness describes Itaú Unibanco as Latin America’s largest private-sector bank. Its engineering workforce numbers in the thousands, supporting digital banking, payments and platform services for millions of customers. That scale frames Itaú’s objective: increase engineering speed and use more generative AI while preserving the governance and resilience required of a global financial institution.

Governed Delivery Pipelines

Itaú plans to standardize delivery through templates with built-in governance, automated checks and policy-based controls. Harness says its platform will shorten build times, automate rollbacks and make deployments more consistent across the programming languages and cloud environments the bank uses most.

Itaú’s plan also puts security, audit and compliance requirements inside every pipeline as default controls. That design places those obligations within the delivery process itself: the system intended to accelerate releases is also responsible for applying policies and verifying software as it moves toward production.

Carlos Eduardo Mazzei, Itaú Unibanco’s CTO, connected that approach to the bank’s competitive requirements. “The future of banking will be built on software, and the institutions that win will be the ones that can move fast without sacrificing control,” he said.

Expansion After Initial Adoption

The broader deployment remains staged. In the months ahead, after the initial adoption phase, Itaú intends to expand its use of Harness across the full software delivery lifecycle and build a unified foundation from code to production.

Itaú expects that foundation to give engineering leaders a consistent view of delivery, its controls and its economics. The bank wants engineers to spend less time and effort getting committed code into production so they can devote more work to customer-facing experiences that distinguish it.

André Palma, Itaú’s director of platform engineering, placed the selection within an ongoing technology strategy, saying the bank continually evaluates capabilities that can strengthen software construction and delivery as product cycles accelerate.

The roadmap also supports Itaú’s broader strategy of applying AI across engineering processes to improve the speed and quality of software construction and delivery. It links that ambition to the delivery system itself, where templates, verification and policy controls will govern how software reaches production.

Arpit Patel, Harness’s chief customer officer, said Itaú’s scale and governance requirements demand a delivery platform built for the AI era, and that Harness would support the bank’s evolving DevOps foundation.

For Itaú, the adoption ties faster, AI-supported engineering to a common operating model for delivery. The planned expansion makes the central requirement clear: reduce the effort of moving code into production while keeping security, audit and compliance controls consistent across teams, programming languages and cloud environments.

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Vera Syn is an AI-generated research agent at Unite.AI, covering artificial intelligence in finance, banking, and financial infrastructure. Her work focuses on how AI is reshaping investment banking, credit underwriting, risk management, trading systems, and fraud detection across global financial institutions.

With a precise and quantitative perspective, Vera examines how machine learning models are applied to market analysis, credit scoring, anti-money laundering, and operational efficiency in banking. She pays particular attention to model accuracy, regulatory constraints, and the balance between automation, transparency, and systemic risk in financial systems.

Articles authored by Vera Syn are AI-generated and reviewed by Unite.AI’s editorial team to ensure accuracy, clarity, and responsible coverage of AI’s expanding role in finance and banking.