Coder Supports Financial Institutions in Secure, Compliant Development

Summary: Why Large Banks Choose Coder

• Development environments run on any cloud or air-gapped infrastructure, ensuring flexibility and compliance with regulations like GDPR and DORA.
• New hires access secure, cloud-based environments in minutes, reducing onboarding times from weeks to same-day readiness.
• Workspace proxies and advanced scaling capabilities minimize latency, enabling globally distributed teams to work efficiently.
• Teams can use their preferred tools, like JupyterLab Notebook, thanks to Coder’s IDE and language-agnostic platform.
• Compute-heavy tasks, such as ML training, are offloaded to powerful cloud resources and GPUs, overcoming the limitations of local laptops.

Our 2025 State of Development Environments research revealed that fewer than 15% of financial services institutions rate highly in governance, developer experience, and speed. Balancing security with a positive developer experience remains a persistent challenge.

Financial institutions must protect sensitive data and comply with regulations like GDPR and DORA, while also empowering developers to innovate safely. Securing development environments is critical, but so is retaining top talent—a lesson Coder’s VP of Enterprise Architecture, Eric Ledyard, knows well. Reflecting on his time as SVP at a major bank, he shared: “When I joined, we had over 40% attrition among new developers before they wrote a line of code because it took 12 weeks to get them onboarded. High-caliber talent didn’t want to wait that long.”

Coder addresses these challenges by providing cloud development environments that strengthen security and improve productivity. With environments hosted on infrastructure organizations control—whether in the cloud or fully air-gapped on-premises—financial institutions minimize risk while enabling teams to work securely and efficiently in a highly regulated, fast-paced industry.

Real-World Success: How Financial Institutions Benefit from Coder

Quickly Onboarding Developers to Secure Development Environments

Challenge

A major U.S.-based investment firm struggled with efficiently onboarding developers to new projects. Setting up local development environments often took weeks, delaying projects and inflating operating costs due to the need for high-powered laptops. Developers were also hesitant to give up the control and familiarity of their local environments, making it difficult to standardize environments across teams.

Solution

Coder improved onboarding by delivering cloud-based workspaces that new hires could access in minutes, not weeks. These environments are automatically provisioned as code using Terraform templates created by the platform engineering team, ensuring they are secure, consistent, and tailored to the developers’ needs.

Coder allows developers to keep using their preferred tools, like VS Code and JupyterLab Notebook, but within an environment that includes configuration guardrails for how infrastructure is provisioned, and source code is managed. This balance between freedom and security made Coder an appealing solution for teams.

Results

• Onboarding times were reduced from weeks to same-day, with new developers ready to contribute code on their first day.
• Switching between projects now takes minutes instead of hours.
• Developers benefit from familiar tools and the benefits of standardized environments, namely less time wasted troubleshooting dependency conflicts and traversing approval queues.

For more details on this firm’s success, check out their case study and webinar recording with Coder, available on-demand.

Adapting to Rapidly-Changing Market Conditions

Challenge

Another top 10 investment firm faced delays in collaboration between their quantitative analysts and floor traders. Analysts built predictive models, but traders often waited hours—or even days—to test them due to slow pipelines. This lag made it difficult for teams to respond quickly to market changes.

Solution

Using Coder, the firm deployed cloud development environments that allowed quants and traders to access and interact with the same models in real-time. Coder’s port-sharing capabilities enabled direct access to models without relying on time-consuming pipelines. Its IDE-agnostic approach supported familiar tools and languages, allowing teams to work together effectively.

Results

• Traders tested strategies as analysts built them, responding quickly to market changes.
• Feedback loops were dramatically shortened, providing a clear advantage during critical trading windows.
• Both teams benefited from real-time collaboration, improving overall efficiency and adaptability.

Key Features of Coder for Financial Institutions

Coder’s platform is designed to help financial institutions meet strict regulatory requirements while providing the flexibility they need to drive innovation. These features make Coder a strong choice for organizations in regulated industries:

• Air-Gapped Deployment Options - In addition to running any major cloud provider, Coder also supports fully air-gapped deployments, allowing institutions to operate in completely isolated infrastructure when necessary. This option is particularly valuable for organizations with the highest data sovereignty requirements.
• Support for Compute-Intensive Workloads - ML engineers and data scientists can offload tasks like model training to cloud GPUs, bypassing the limitations of local hardware while maintaining access to familiar tools like JupyterLab Notebook.
• Global Scalability and Performance - Coder ensures fast, responsive environments for distributed teams with features like workspace proxies, reducing latency by hosting workspaces close to developers. This makes it easy to support teams across many regions without sacrificing performance or security.
• Customizable Workspace Templates - Administrators can standardize workspaces using Terraform to define tools, configurations, and security policies. This ensures compliance with internal standards and regulatory frameworks while maintaining flexibility for teams.
• Enterprise Integrations - Coder integrates with key enterprise systems, such as Active Directory for authentication and Prometheus for monitoring. These integrations simplify operations while ensuring alignment with existing compliance frameworks.
• Audit Logging and Activity Monitoring - With detailed audit logs and command tracking, administrators have full visibility into user activity. This enables compliance with regulations like GDPR and DORA by providing the documentation required for audits and incident response.
• * Modern Alternative to Legacy VDI - By centralizing secure, high-performance cloud environments, Coder eliminates the management overhead, high costs, and poor developer experience of VDI so that teams can work more efficiently with the tools they prefer.

For a deeper dive into Coder’s capabilities and how it stacks up against other providers in the cloud development environment space, check out our latest Enterprise Buyer’s Guide to CDEs.

The Foundation for Secure and Compliant Innovation

For financial institutions, balancing security with developer productivity is essential.

From reducing delays to ensuring compliance, Coder replaces decentralized local development environments with secure, scalable cloud environments. It’s not just part of the solution—it’s the foundation for secure, compliant, and future-ready development.

Do you want to hear more about how other regulated companies secure their development environments with Coder? Contact us for a demo today.