Phoenix Group was facing challenges with developer onboarding and increasing in-house development.
The organisation adopted Microsoft Dev Box, embracing cloud workspaces to drive change.
Phoenix Group reduced developer onboarding from one month to one day and increased efficiency by 90%, enabling the company to deliver a better experience for its employees and customers.
“GitHub Copilot enables our developers to do their job well. The main benefits we’re seeing are around developer productivity, efficiency and heavy lifting. Although we’re relatively early in our adoption journey, those using it have told me they are delighted.”
Matthew Griffiths, Head of Cloud, Phoenix Group
Founded in 1782, Phoenix Group is one of the largest long-term savings and retirement businesses in the UK. More than two centuries on and a few name, location, and product changes later, one thing has remained constant – their purpose of helping people secure a life of possibilities.
Phoenix Group always has one eye on the future. That’s why they launched a digital transformation program, aimed at improving internal processes and delivering the innovative experience customers expect today – such as their pension management app and online pension calculator.
To support these ambitions, Phoenix Group is partnering with Microsoft, adopting Microsoft Dev Box and GitHub Copilot to rapidly onboard developers and empower them to build solutions more efficiently.
Matthew Griffiths, Head of Cloud at Phoenix Group, illustrates this drive for change, “We want to give our developers and engineers a good experience. We want them to join Phoenix, have the tools to do their job and focus on adding value.”
By implementing Microsoft Dev Box, a cloud workstation platform built for development teams, Phoenix Group enabled developers to rapidly spin up workstations with pre-configured tools and source code, allowing them to start projects immediately. With seamless integration into Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Intune, administrators can extend policies and optimise resources, ensuring each workstation remains secure and cost-efficient.
Matthew Buchanan, Principal Platform Engineer, explains, “Our aim was to make the onboarding process even smoother and get people up and running faster. Dev Box has enabled this and delivered a powerful change for us. Now, we can put more control into the hands of the developers who are actually using these services.”
With instant access to customised cloud workstations, developer onboarding has dramatically reduced from up to one month to just one day, enabling Phoenix Group to hire more experienced developers, reduce reliance on third parties and build more complex applications at pace.
Andy Furness, Systems Infrastructure Architect, adds, “Onboarding new developers so they can write code on the afternoon of their first day – instead of three to four weeks later – is a real big shift. On one project, the process of preparing and transferring files to a third party would’ve taken days. Now we can do it ourselves in minutes.”
As an all-in-one platform, Dev Box supports multiple environments on one machine, reducing context-switching and boosting efficiency. It also offers modern security and authentication, eliminating the need for multiple passwords.
To further support its developers, Phoenix Group is also adopting GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered coding assistant, that acts as a pair programmer to enhance productivity. Integrated seamlessly into text editors like Visual Studio, it provides in-project code suggestions, along with chat and review features. This allows developers to write code faster, fix vulnerabilities automatically and do it all with greater accuracy.
Matthew Griffiths highlights its value, “GitHub Copilot enables our developers to do their job well. The main benefits we’re seeing are around developer productivity, efficiency and heavy lifting. Although we’re relatively early in our adoption journey, those using it have told me they are delighted.”
By delivering instant code suggestions, GitHub Copilot accelerates in-house development. Developers complete tasks more quickly and focus on meaningful work, improving both job satisfaction and employee engagement. It’s empowering teams and inspiring innovation across Phoenix Group.
90% increased efficiency
As cloud-based solutions, both Microsoft Dev Box and GitHub Copilot integrated smoothly with Phoenix Group’s existing multi-cloud estate, allowing fast deployment, minimal downtime and immediate return on investment.
Matthew Buchanan adds, “With Dev Box, the software's always at the latest release, which is fantastic. It’s also very easy to stay up to date in terms of connectivity.” He continues, “There would normally be challenges preventing us from adopting solutions like Copilot, but these have been removed now. We never could’ve achieved this in a legacy desktop environment.”
These tools also support Phoenix Group’s broader commercial IT strategy, with no upfront costs or on-premises maintenance required.
Phoenix Group sees a bright future for technology in the organisation. Adopting Microsoft Dev Box and GitHub Copilot has opened the door to faster innovation, enabling the company to roll out mobile apps and digital tools months earlier, enhancing the customer experience.
Following this success, Phoenix Group is expanding its rollout of Dev Box and GitHub Copilot to other technical teams, enhancing coding capabilities and encouraging greater collaboration. The company is also exploring new features in Dev Box, including Windows Subsystem for Linux, to support developers with even more flexibility.
James Head, Head of Capital Markets Transformation, concludes, “Adopting Microsoft Dev Box and GitHub Copilot has given us a great springboard to continue to innovate and develop new solutions internally.”
Discover more about Phoenix Group on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X/Twitter
“Adopting Microsoft Dev Box and GitHub Copilot has given us a great springboard to continue to innovate and develop new solutions internally.”
James Head, Head of Capital Markets Transformation, Phoenix Group
Follow Microsoft