37% improvement in median development time for 170-person engineering group, ensuring the on-time release of a major new offering
42% reduction in median development time for pilot group
Leveraged Gemini Code Assist to slash root-cause identification from hours to minutes for the support team
100% improvement in merge requests per developer
50% increase in commits developer
ComplyAdvantage cut development time 37% with Gemini Code Assist, enabling predictable, timely delivery of a major new offering.
ComplyAdvantage cut development time 37% with Gemini Code Assist, enabling predictable, timely delivery of a major new offering.
Turning technical debt into a strategic advantage
Financial crime moves at the speed of light—and so do the tools that aim to combat it. AI-powered platforms now detect suspicious transactions in real time, automatically processing sanctions updates within minutes of publication and analyzing global news feeds to identify emerging risks. What once required teams of compliance analysts can now be done through sophisticated machine learning models that grow smarter with every data point.
For ComplyAdvantage, a financial crime prevention platform, this transformation presented an opportunity to scale its AI-driven services to get ahead of increasing and evolving threats. However, this also meant working through complex technical challenges: processing massive volumes of unstructured data from global sources, managing sophisticated legacy codebases, and empowering developers to focus on innovation rather than routine maintenance tasks.
The company's transition from startup to scale-up created additional technical debt challenges. Much of ComplyAdvantage’s existing codebase lacked documentation, with original developers no longer at the company. New team members and contractors struggled to navigate brownfield code, while senior developers spent valuable time on repetitive tasks like debugging customer issues and generating unit tests instead of focusing on core platform innovation.
ComplyAdvantage turned to Gemini Code Assist to complement its multi-cloud approach while maintaining development tool consistency. The decision prioritized data sovereignty and security, along with proven infrastructure from Google Cloud. Rather than an all-or-nothing approach, the team first ran a methodical pilot program starting with 20 senior developers across its three global development centers to validate measurable benefits. Following the pilot’s success, ComplyAdvantage then fully rolled out the solution to the broader development team.
We are looking to accelerate code development at a factor of 10. We needed to find a way to do that while maintaining data sovereignty and security, and Gemini Code Assist became that solution.
Jennifer Bursack
Sr Director, Technology Operations, ComplyAdvantage
Transforming developer productivity through intelligent code assistance
ComplyAdvantage's developers now use Gemini Code Assist across multiple critical workflows. For brownfield code navigation, new developers and contractors use Code Assist to understand complex existing codebases, dependencies, and integration points. Instead of relying solely on senior developer availability and lengthy code reviews, team members can quickly grasp context through AI-powered code summaries and explanations. This proves especially valuable for remote contractors who lack the informal knowledge transfer that happens in hybrid office environments.
Code Assist also revolutionized ComplyAdvantage’s customer support workflow. For instance, the engineering team processed more than 500 support requests through Gemini, automatically categorizing them as genuine support issues versus bugs that required engineering attention. The tool achieved 75% accuracy in spot-checks and identified requests that should’ve been escalated to higher priority incidents, enabling better resource allocation and faster customer resolution. With Code Assist, ComplyAdvantage can maintain 4-9 second SLA of its runtime services, meaning the team doesn’t have to compromise speed of development and delivery with quality.
“In one instance, a developer used Gemini Code Assist to identify the root cause of a customer’s bug within minutes,” Bursack says. “This previously would’ve taken hours of manual code investigation, but Code Assist immediately isolated the issue and enabled rapid resolution.”
The team also used analytics platform Jellyfish to track development lifecycle metrics from Jira and GitLab. This enabled ComplyAdvantage to compare results between Code Assist users and non-users.
When the pilot group achieved a 42% improvement in development time, ComplyAdvantage then rolled out the solution more broadly in production. With that group, the team has seen a 37% median reduction in development time. Further, ComplyAdvantage mandates that 80% of their code must be tested prior to reaching production. This unit test generation—previously a time-intensive requirement—is now completed significantly faster, allowing developers to focus on complex problem-solving rather than routine tasks.
“We operate on the principle that you can’t improve what you don’t measure, using Jellyfish to see exactly where our engineering efforts are allocated,” Bursack says. “The productivity lift from Gemini Code Assist isn’t just a feeling—it’s a measurable impact we see in our Jellyfish data, helping us deliver on strategic goals faster.”
In one instance, a developer used Gemini Code Assist to identify the root cause of a customer’s bug within minutes. This previously would’ve taken hours of manual code investigation, but Code Assist immediately isolated the issue and enabled rapid resolution.
Jennifer Bursack
Sr Director, Technology Operations, ComplyAdvantage
Building developer communities and strategic AI integration for the future
Beyond individual productivity gains, Gemini Code Assist brought unexpected collaboration benefits. ComplyAdvantage's biweekly AI community of practice meetings grew from small, sporadic attendance to approximately 70 developers sharing use cases, troubleshooting challenges, and discovering new features. This organic knowledge sharing helped accelerate adoption and created internal evangelists who demonstrated advanced capabilities to their peers.
These community meetings also drove adoption of emerging capabilities. When Gemini Code Assist launched command-line interface (CLI) support, senior and principal developers who preferred working in the terminal quickly migrated from alternative tools. The CLI's faster response times and streamlined workflow particularly appealed to developers who had avoided IDE-based coding assistants or hadn't realized the capability existed within Gemini.
The tool's large context window capabilities particularly excite senior developers who work on complex, multi-day development projects. Unlike simple refactoring tasks, these longer-term projects benefit from persistent context that builds understanding over time, supporting pair programming scenarios where two developers work together and share cognitive load.
Looking ahead, ComplyAdvantage plans to extend Gemini capabilities beyond development productivity in two ways. First, it wants to fine-tune models for use in its customer-facing features to improve end user experiences. Second, the team wants to extend root cause analysis tools to first-line customer service representatives so they can troubleshoot issues that currently require engineering intervention.
This strategic approach to applying AI to development workflows has given ComplyAdvantage a competitive advantage in real-time financial crime detection while building a more collaborative, efficient culture that scales with its growing global customer base.
Our developers are much happier now that we use Gemini Code Assist because they can do more in the same amount of time.
Jennifer Bursack
Sr Director, Technology Operations, ComplyAdvantage
By harnessing AI, a unified platform, and an extensive partner ecosystem, ComplyAdvantage helps customers turn compliance into a catalyst for growth, operational resilience, and enduring regulatory trust. More than 3,000 enterprises across 75 countries rely on their end-to-end platform and the world’s most comprehensive financial crime risk intelligence.
Industry: Technology
Location: United States
Products: Google Cloud, Gemini Code Assist, Gemini CLI
About Google Cloud partner — Jellyfish
Jellyfish unites media, creative, and data through leading technology and generative AI.
