The second-largest digital bank in Brazil now boasts the lowest cost to serve among all Latin American fintechs
The Challenge
With over 60 million customers, PicPay is the second-largest digital bank in Brazil — and its engineering infrastructure is every bit as vast as you’d imagine. PicPay has 20 discrete business units, supported by more than 2,000 engineers in over 240 squads.
PicPay had geared up for an IPO back in 2021, but withdrew the filing because of volatile market conditions. Following the withdrawal, PicPay set about transforming their organizational philosophy: shifting from an all-in focus on top-line growth to a steadier focus on efficiency. One of the world’s largest cloud-native organizations, PicPay had a substantial cloud footprint, and knew that if they were going to drive true efficiency, it was going to start in the cloud.
As they set about tackling the cloud efficiency project, PicPay developed a few key goals:
- Allocate 100% of cloud costs to business units and owners. PicPay knew that driving cloud efficiency meant driving cloud accountability, and to do that, they’d have to define which of their 2,000+ engineers owned exactly which of their cloud costs. But their complex multi-cloud footprint — which spanned AWS, GCP, Oracle Cloud, and MongoDB Atlas, and included substantial Kubernetes spending — made comprehensive manual cost allocation impossible.
- Identify and eradicate cost inefficiencies. With such a vast cloud footprint and such steep allocation challenges, PicPay struggled to separate healthy costs from unhealthy ones, much less to eradicate inefficiencies.
- Define a performant and efficient operational model. A FinOps practice only works when it successfully integrates into all stakeholders’ daily workflows. PicPay knew that once they laid a foundation of visibility and efficiency, they’d need to build proper methods to ensure optimal practices and quality assurance.
- Drive engineering- and executive-level engagement. For PicPay’s efficiency work to provide long-term business value, they’d need buy-in from every level of the organization, from individual contributor engineers through executive leaders.
The Solution
In 2022 PicPay engaged CloudZero, the global leader in proactive cloud efficiency. Across three years of partnership, CloudZero has helped transform PicPay’s business from the inside out.
1. Clear Cost Ownership And Visibility
Using CloudZero’s CostFormation® solution, PicPay was able to accurately allocate costs even in poorly tagged environments, enabling instant chargebacks to business units. This gave teams real-time visibility into the financial impact of their actions and access to AI-generated and custom cost insights, driving ownership and accountability across the organization.
2. Data-Driven Prioritization Of Unhealthy Costs
By correlating cost data with business metrics like MAU, MAT, transactions, and revenue drivers, PicPay identified which cost increases actually delivered more value and which were inefficient. This approach minimized false alarms and ensured engineering time was focused on the highest-impact cost actions.
3. Scalable FinOps Operational Model
PicPay’s FinOps, Performance & Resilience team collaborated with CloudZero’s FinOps Account Management (FAM) team to automate processes, establish guardrails, and build a structured framework to monitor and optimize costs. With automated alerts, KPIs, and anomaly detection, PicPay enabled early cost interventions and influenced product and platform design decisions to shift cost optimization left.
4. Executive Alignment And Community Engagement
CloudZero’s platform provided transparent, real-time cost visibility across multiple audiences — from developers to executives. This allowed PicPay to align cost efficiency with business outcomes, reinforce KPIs and OKRs, and make cost optimization a core engineering and management discipline.
The Results
Across the engagement, PicPay has achieved exceptional business and operational results, and has powered strong revenue and profitability numbers as it readies for a U.S. IPO.
Realized $18.6M In Annualized Cloud Cost Savings Across 2024 and 2025
PicPay has prevented a tremendous amount of wasteful cloud spending, through three concurrent mechanisms:
- Direct cost optimizations: Rightsizing, upgrading, or eliminating inefficient cloud resources contributed $1M in annualized savings.
- Cost avoidance: PicPay used CloudZero to identify cost spikes early and prevent overspending, resulting in $1.8M in annualized savings.
- Rate optimizations: Fine-tuning their savings plans and resource commitments led to an additional $16.8M of annualized savings.
Achieved Lowest Cost To Serve Among Latin American FinTechs
“Cost to serve” refers to the costs PicPay incurs when processing each of its customer’s needs. Comparing cost to serve to revenue per user gives PicPay the central KPI they use in assessing their efficiency.
“Average revenue per active user today is more than three times higher than the cost to serve — the lowest in the market,” said Eduardo Chedid, PicPay’s CEO.
Engaged 350+ Engineers In Cloud Efficiency
PicPay sees an average of 350+ engineers logging into CloudZero on a monthly basis. This represents 17.5% of their vast engineering workforce, and is a key reason why they’ve driven such impressive efficiency outcomes.
PicPay’s story is a prime example of how CloudZero operates:
- Achieve complete visibility
- Use that visibility to drive engineering accountability
- Institute process to turn accountability into business efficiency
