How The Bank of Missouri Moved from DevOps Clutter to AI-Powered Success

The Challenge

Banking on Uncertain Deployments

The Bank of Missouri implemented Salesforce specifically to support nCino's lending platform. "We're on Salesforce because we wanted to move to nCino and in order to have nCino you have to have Salesforce," Sara Wilterdink, Digital Technology & Operations Supervisor at The Bank of Missouri mentions. However, the three-admin team struggled with manual deployments, frequent overwrites and lack of visibility into each other's work.

Serving 200+ users across commercial lending, treasury, contract services, and consumer lending, the team had no structured process for tracking changes or managing releases for both Salesforce and nCino. The lack of structured DevOps meant that changes to loan flows, validation rules, and banking workflows could overwrite each other, creating compliance risks. "Before Copado, our releases were manual and difficult to execute,” says Wilterdink.  “We had three admins and there was no visibility into what everybody was working on."

The testing process was equally challenging. Full end-to-end testing required 2+ hour calls with users from each role, passing loans from user to user as different steps were needed for completion. Saturday testing sessions for nCino releases lasted 4-6 hours due to uncertainty about system changes, while Salesforce enhancements were delayed by these manual deployment processes. Pain points included the amount of time required for testing, inconsistent testing from month-to-month and user-to-user, and coordinating testers for weekend deployments.
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Key Challenges

The Solution

Express Banking Made Easy

The Bank of Missouri implemented Copado Essentials to jump start their DevOps transformation but soon upgraded to Copado Express with full AI integration. This specifically scaled the complex Salesforce and nCino environment.

Shifting to Copado Express provided The Bank of Missouri team with seamless deployment coordination between their CRM operations and loan origination processes. By providing individual sandboxes for each admin and automating pipelines, the team achieved predictable monthly releases and eliminated the frustration of manual deployments.

Copado's data deployment templates help manage nCino's record-based configurations and the Salesforce-native interface made adoption easier for their admin team.  "We liked the data templates that Copado had. They were a starting point for us that other platforms didn't offer at the time,” comments Robert Johnson, Senior nCino Administrator at The Bank of Missouri. “And we like the UI for Express, as it’s right in Salesforce."

The Pipeline Manager and Builder are particularly valuable for Bank of Missouri's daily operations. "I've had a really good experience with Copado's Pipeline Builder and Manager,” explains Johnson. “We refreshed about six sandboxes daily. It’s easy to add and update an org and get them all synced back up to the Copado Pipeline.”

The visibility provided by Pipeline Manager has transformed team collaboration. "I love being able to log into Copado's Pipeline Manager and see where every user story is in the pipeline. So if I'm working on something, my team knows what org I'm in, if I'm still working on a certain org, what changes I've made, and if they have any questions, they know what to ask or where to ask it," Johnson continues.

‍Revolutionizing Banking with AI

‍By implementing Copado AI, The Bank of Missouri has revolutionized their DevOps processes and transformed how they handled development requests across their banking operations.  The AI agents help analyze Salesforce metadata and nCino dependencies, review requirements, identify impacted objects and generate Apex code for banking-specific needs.

When working on loan-related changes, the AI provides guidance on field locations and workflow impacts, significantly reducing the time needed to understand and implement user requests. “It went from a week and a half to clarify what they wanted, to a day,” confirms Johnson.
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The Outcome

Banking Operations Transformed

The Bank of Missouri now manages their entire Salesforce and nCino DevOps with confidence. Monthly deployments ensure commercial lending teams, consumer lenders, credit analysts, and treasury operations receive consistent, tested enhancements. "Our deployment times went down from three or four hours to one or two hours with Copado Essentials,” Robert boasts. “Now that we’re using Copado Express, it's down to 30 minutes for all the changes."

For internal stakeholders, DevOps provides visual tracking of work in progress and identifies conflicts in work efforts. For external stakeholders, DevOps ensures proper testing and vetting of changes to guarantee quality before moving to production. The transformation has enabled the team to streamline development and deployment processes while clarifying requirements upfront and providing assistance with testing scenarios.

The AI-powered user story creation captures complex banking requirements from multiple departments, while automated pipelines ensure that changes to loan flows don't impact deposit operations or contract services. Their Center of Excellence (COE) process prioritizes regulatory requirements and cross-departmental banking needs effectively.

The Pipeline Manager's visibility has been crucial for maintaining their streamlined operations across 12 sandboxes. "Visibility on where work or what orgs need updating, is logged in the system. If there is a conflict that we missed, we can catch that quickly with the Copado Pipeline Manager. It's been huge, being able to see where everything is," notes Johnson.

The Bank of Missouri team understands complex requirements faster and implements changes more efficiently across their integrated banking platform thanks to Copado’s AI tools.The team leverages Copado's AI agents extensively, particularly for metadata analysis and user story creation. What previously took hours of investigation now takes 15-30 minutes, and the AI's metadata awareness provides context-specific solutions for their unique banking environment.
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The Future

Scaling Innovation with Robotic Testing

With The Bank of Missouri’s disciplined COE process, managing enhancement requests from the business, they're positioned to continue scaling their digital banking transformation while maintaining the highest standards of financial services compliance and innovation. “Through each enhancement process, we’re also learning more about the business. So we’re able to identify the opportunities where we can make further adjustments for our users which further transforms the way we’re approaching the business," Sara comments.

The team looks to implement Copado Robotic Testing (CRT) to further automate their Salesforce and nCino quality assurance processes. They envision a (near) future where AI agents automatically generate test scripts for complex banking workflows, ensuring comprehensive testing across commercial lending, consumer lending, and treasury operations simultaneously. "My hope is that we can add to our guidelines for the agent details on how we want to build test scripts for Copado Robotic Testing,” Robert says.

For The Bank of Missouri, success is measured in the development and delivery of high quality solutions for their business users. With automated testing, deployments will be completed even quicker, more efficiently, without conflict, and with minimal or no manual intervention.
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