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“With IBM Cloudability, we finally show the full cost per product—across four clouds, Kubernetes, and even non‑cloud vendors—in BRL. That clarity let us launch chargeback, shift our culture, and save days of manual work every month.”
As a national Brazilian card brand, ELO now operates 100% in the cloud across Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud (OCI). As its multi‑cloud environment matured, ELO needed a complete, trusted view of cloud and broader IT costs at the product level (“product” here refers to ELO’s own business products and services, not cloud provider services). With IBM Cloudability, the company unified spend visibility across clouds, implemented product‑level chargeback, achieved precise Kubernetes (AKS) allocation, integrated non‑cloud IT spend, and standardized all reporting in local currency (BRL)—strengthening cost accountability and reducing manual effort.
ELO is a Brazilian payment card brand founded as a joint venture between three of the country’s largest financial institutions: Banco do Brasil, Bradesco, and Caixa Econômica Federal. Created as a domestic alternative to global networks such as Mastercard and Visa, ELO has established itself as Brazil’s first fully national card brand, serving a broad and growing customer base enabled by the scale and reach of its founding banks.
While ELO operates in a highly competitive card market, it continues to expand its market penetration and demonstrate strong momentum in both business and financial growth. The company’s strategy emphasizes innovation, operational agility, and modern digital infrastructure.
A major point of pride for ELO is its status as one of the first card brands globally to run 100% in the cloud, following a multi‑year migration away from on‑premises infrastructure. Today, the company operates across Azure, AWS, GCP, and OCI, with significant reliance on AKS to support a large‑scale microservices environment. A central FinOps team partners with product owners across the organization, each responsible for multiple budget lines tied to the technologies and services they provide.
ELO’s rapid cloud expansion created fragmented cost data across multiple providers, making it difficult to maintain a consistent or reliable view of spend. By default, much of the company’s cloud consumption was categorized as centralized ‘infrastructure’, obscuring how products contributed to overall costs.
Meanwhile, Kubernetes presented its own challenges: thousands of AKS containers, inconsistent labels, and evolving metadata made manual product attribution nearly impossible. Shared services like networking and observability added further complexity, requiring fair and defensible allocation methods. Finally, ELO needed visibility beyond cloud alone—licensing, support, and vendor spend all needed to be incorporated for product owners to understand their full cost footprint.
“Before Cloudability, a large part of our cloud spend sat in infrastructure, so products didn’t see their full cost.” — Lucas V. S. da Silva, FinOps Lead
To address these challenges, ELO deployed Cloudability as the central system of record for cloud cost management. The platform’s allocation, planning, currency normalization, and Kubernetes mapping capabilities enabled ELO to establish strong financial governance and a defensible chargeback model.
ELO’s chargeback model begins with direct cost attribution, where Cloudability applies rules against billing attributes from each vendor — tags/labels, accounts/subscriptions, etc — to map spend to the right product.
With direct costs assigned, ELO then applies a sequence of cost sharing rules within Cloudability to fully distribute shared or crosscutting spend. Examples include:
This layered approach – direct mapping first, then ordered cost sharing – gave ELO a transparent and defensible internal billing model. This enabled the rollout of product-level chargeback in January 2026, which increased engagement from product teams and moved spend accountability out of a central “infrastructure” bucket and into the hands of the owners driving usage.
To solve notoriously difficult AKS allocation challenges, ELO initially exported its entire container inventory and then collaborated with product managers to classify services. From there they were able to use Cloudability to officially map label values to ELO products and get an accurate cost attribution. “For AKS, combining labels with Business Mapping made precise chargeback possible,” Lucas noted. ELO now sees defensible, product‑level microservice costs—something previously out of reach.
Through Cloudability FOCUS support, ELO incorporated non-CSP costs—such as software licenses, support contracts, and third-party services—into the same model as cloud spend, then exposed it all through rich product owner dashboards. These views clearly separate direct and shared costs, so owners can see what they consume outright versus what they receive from shared services (e.g., network, observability). A simple product toggle lets leaders flip the entire dataset between the multiple ELO products they manage, making it fast to explore trends, drill into drivers, and investigate anomalies—all in one place.
Cloudability’s multi‑currency service converts all cloud and IT spend into Brazilian reais (BRL), ensuring consistency across financial reporting and planning. This is especially important for ELO because its multi‑cloud and vendor ecosystem produces invoices in multiple currencies—including USD for AWS and BRL for certain domestic services. By standardizing all of this into a single local currency, ELO removes exchange‑rate ambiguity and gives product owners a clear, comparable view of their true costs.
With Cloudability Forecasts and Budgets, product teams now compare spend against expectations through intuitive dashboards organized by product and budget line. The upcoming implementation of budget alerts by the FinOps team will provide early warnings for budget violations. Meanwhile, Cloudability’s automated bill ingestion and normalization saves this team roughly five full workdays of manual effort per month, freeing capacity for higher‑value analysis.
Looking ahead, ELO plans to refine its cloud commitment strategy—continuing with Savings Plans where risk is low while building maturity for deeper commitments. The company also intends to expand consumption‑based allocation for services like Datadog as more granular telemetry becomes available. Later in 2026, the ELO FinOps team expects to tie cloud and IT spend to key business metrics such as card transaction count, leveraging Cloudability to achieve full unit economics.
