Executive summary

As PicPay Bank, a Nasdaq-listed Brazilian fintech bank, scaled to serving nearly 30 million customers, it needed an orchestration platform that could support continued growth without disrupting mission-critical banking operations. Its single-server Control-M environment created growing concerns around operational resilience, automation governance, and consumption accountability. By migrating to Control-M SaaS, PicPay gained built-in high availability, jobs-as-code automation, and clear FinOps visibility, creating a more resilient and governed foundation for growth. Already, automation delivery time has dropped from up to four days to under one hour, a reduction of more than 98%.

Company overview

PicPay didn’t start as a bank. Founded in Vitória, Brazil in 2012, it began as a digital payments pioneer, offering instant peer-to-peer transfers and QR code payments before Pix became the national standard. Over the next decade, it evolved into something far larger.

Today, PicPay is a full-service financial institution regulated by the Central Bank of Brazil, with a digital application spanning payments, marketplace shopping, investments, credit cards, and lending. It serves close to 30 million customers, employs nearly 5,000 people, and completed its IPO on Nasdaq in January 2026 under the symbol PICS.

That combination is what makes PicPay unusual. It carries the agility of a fintech and the compliance demands of a regulated bank—all while operating at the scale of a publicly traded company. Behind the app, thousands of automated processes keep the business running: opening the banking core each day, reconciling accounts with regulators, exchanging files with partners, and clearing payments. Orchestrating all of it is Control-M.

The challenge

PicPay’s growth had outpaced its automation infrastructure. For years, the bank has relied on Control-M to orchestrate critical business services and operational workflow, but due to internal constraints, keeping up with deployment had become a liability rather than an asset.

It wasn’t a single technology issue. It was a combination of pressures converging at once.

• A version upgrade overdue. PicPay’s Control-M environment needed updating, and doing so in-house would demand specialized expertise the team wasn’t positioned to maintain. “I’m sure that even if we did the best possible work here, it would never be as transparent as it is in SaaS,” says Luiz Mercante, Database Engineering and Batch Mesh Manager at PicPay. “SaaS will upgrade a version and I won’t even notice. That’s not something our team could replicate on premise.”
• A single point of failure. The environment ran on one virtual machine with no high availability. For a regulated bank, that risk was severe. “Imagine if I arrived in the morning and the new day hadn’t opened in the banking core. No one could make a transaction; no one could see their balance or statement,” Mercante explains. Miss a regulatory deadline, and the consequences grow more serious still.
• Licensing and FinOps blind spots. Teams kept unused automations in reserve rather than removing them, in case they were needed again. The result was a stockpile of inactive jobs nobody could track. “We had a licensing risk problem,” says Mercante. Allocating costs by job count proved nearly impossible, leaving PicPay unable to charge consumption back to the business units that generated it.
• Slow time-to-market. Business units depended on central teams to build automations. A single request could take a day or more, passing through network, infrastructure, and database teams before going live.

PicPay’s culture made the status quo untenable. The company prizes ownership, discipline, and simplicity. Continuing the same path with uncontrolled, ungoverned growth—and the financial and reputational risk that came with it—wasn’t an option.

The solution

PicPay had worked with BMC for years, across multiple institutions and prior migrations. When the bank reached a renewal decision point and evaluated competing options, including Apache Airflow, that history carried real weight.

“The differentiator is BMC’s massive presence already in the market,” says Mercante. “BMC brings a history of performance to the table, so we have trust. Plus, our specialist already had experience and was comfortable working with Control-M.”

Continuing with BMC also meant PicPay could migrate its existing workflows into a native SaaS operating model, rather than rebuilding job-by-job on unfamiliar technology with a new partner.

“BMC knows more about Control-M than we do and will keep it updated and available with incredible simplicity,” says Mercante. “So it made a lot of sense to move to the SaaS platform.”

To eliminate operational risk, PicPay adopted a phased migration strategy. A six-month on-premises bridge kept production running while Control-M SaaS was activated in parallel across production and non-production environments. PicPay is carrying out the migration itself, with BMC’s education and professional services teams built into the plan to drive full platform adoption and team enablement. 

The migration surfaced two unusual requirements, and BMC engineered solutions for both:

• IBM DataStage^® support. DataStage underpinned a very large share of PicPay’s workflows and was crucial to the operation, but BMC’s migration plugin didn’t yet support it. BMC’s developers implemented a patch that added support, unblocking the transition. “Without the DataStage plug-in we wouldn’t have been able to migrate to SaaS,” says Mercante.
• Coexisting agents. To migrate in controlled waves rather than all at once, PicPay needed the existing agents and the SaaS agents to run side by side. BMC delivered that capability. 

Throughout the rollout, BMC’s team stayed closely engaged—running regular working sessions, reviewing documentation, and adjusting the plan as new needs surfaced. The waves were sequenced deliberately, so each stage could inform the next, and the schedule shifted around a few holiday periods along the way. With validation testing complete, PicPay moved into its final production waves.

The results

PicPay completed its migration to Control-M SaaS, and the operational benefits are already clear.

• Built-in high availability. By contracting for reliability rather than managing servers, PicPay eliminated its single point of failure. “We only had one VM, and it was our single point of failure,” Mercante explains. “With BMC, I don’t have to manage two servers in different clouds—I don’t even have to get into that level of detail. I already have high availability, so I achieve two objectives by making this change.” The team no longer worries about a frozen machine halting critical processes—from settlements to regulatory file exchanges to the daily banking-core rollover.
• Automation delivered in under an hour, not days. Jobs-as-code, built on APIs, gives business units the autonomy to build their own automations within enforced quality standards. Requests that once took three to four days now take less than an hour—a reduction of more than 98%. “It’s a very significant reduction,” Mercante confirms. “Implementing jobs-as-code means I can give people more autonomy, and with that there will be more agility; it will be faster to deliver and meet the business need.”
• Clear FinOps and cost accountability. A pay-per-execution model gives PicPay a precise view of consumption. Costs now flow to the correct product P&L, correcting allocation distortions that had built up under the old model, and built-in guardrails prevent wasteful practices like running a job every minute. The core team no longer pays for stockpiled jobs it doesn’t use. “For decentralized companies like ours, guardrails are extremely important,” says Mercante. “With guardrails, I can ensure quality and standardization, and with quality and standardization, we can achieve sustainable growth.”
• A more valuable team. The migration is transforming PicPay’s operations staff. Rather than manually monitoring Control-M, operations engineers are becoming site reliability engineers with deep Control-M expertise—a rare, in-demand skill set. “I’ll have more people thinking about innovating, automating things, and doing valuable work instead of operating a repetitive task,” says Mercante.

Mercante sums up the value simply: “BMC, through the SaaS model, reduces cognitive load and increases the autonomy of the business units, putting people into strategic activities while Control-M performs the repetitive work.”

Looking ahead

PicPay’s migration to Control-M SaaS did more than modernize a platform. It laid the foundation for the bank’s next stage of growth—removing single points of failure, giving business units the autonomy to move faster, and bringing financial discipline to how automation is consumed and paid for.

The road ahead is one of expansion. PicPay relies heavily on Control-M to trigger file exchanges with partners that carry regulatory deadlines—and the team plans to expand that use further, leveraging Control-M with MFT to manage a growing volume of partner file exchanges.

With the core platform modernized, Mercante’s team also plans to bring Control-M to more business units across the company, mapping new use cases where orchestration can solve real business problems. “I see SaaS as the path to the future,” Mercante says. “It is easier and cheaper to automate using Control-M than using other market tools, even cloud-native tools. I expect more business units to adopt Control-M as their automation solution.”