From manual tracking to strategic forecasting: Núclea’s FinOps evolution with Pier Cloud

Núclea, a leading data and financial technology company, needed to streamline cloud cost management, enhance financial visibility, and automate reporting across a complex, multi-account AWS environment. Pier Cloud enabled granular cost control and strategic forecasting.

Problem

Núclea operates in a high-volume, data-intensive environment, processing billions of financial transactions across sectors like insurance, receivables, and tokenization. With a complex AWS multi-account structure spread across different legal entities (CNPJs), the company struggled to consolidate cloud costs in a way that reflected its real business operations. Financial reporting required visibility in both USD and BRL, yet existing tools couldn’t provide granular, localized insights. Teams spent excessive time on manual spreadsheets to generate executive reports, sacrificing bandwidth for more strategic analysis. On top of that, Núclea lacked visibility into the actual cost of delivering its core financial services. Without a clear understanding of cost per transaction, it was nearly impossible to allocate budgets accurately, model forecasts effectively, or guide executive decisions with confidence. This combination of fragmented visibility, operational inefficiency, and budgetary uncertainty created an urgent need for a scalable, intelligent FinOps solution.

Proposed solution

To address these challenges, Pier Cloud implemented a tailored solution leveraging the full capabilities of its platform — starting with Lighthouse, which provided a centralized, real-time view of cloud spend segmented by product line and displayed in both USD and BRL. This dual-currency visibility allowed executives to track financial performance with clarity and precision. By configuring the Organizational Map, Núclea was able to map cloud consumption directly to its key financial services — including tokenization, insurance, digital assets, and receivables — unlocking insights into cost per transaction that had never been accessible before. This visibility became a foundation for more accurate budget planning and strategic decision-making.

Through Lighthouse, Pier’s platform uses S3 to collect customer AWS billing information. We then work on ETL and processing to build the allocation and visibility required for the customer’s context. We use Athena to read the information.

In parallel, the Cloud Compliance Analyzer (CCA) began generating intelligent recommendations for cost reduction based on real usage behavior. The platform highlighted concrete opportunities for optimization and quantified potential savings, allowing Núclea’s team to prioritize actions with the highest financial impact. Reporting processes that previously demanded days of manual work were automated within the platform, giving back valuable time to the team to focus on analysis instead of execution. Together, these changes transformed how Núclea managed its cloud costs — from reactive spreadsheet-based tracking to real-time, insight-driven financial operations.

The CCA captures information via SDK from an assumed role in the client accounts. With the data we capture, we can help our clients identify idle resources, implement best practices, and propose technological upgrades, contributing to the optimization and efficiency of their infrastructure.

Outcomes

In just a few months, Núclea achieved real gains in visibility, planning accuracy, and operational efficiency. With daily dashboards in Lighthouse, executives now track cloud costs by product line — in both BRL and USD — enabling faster and more informed decisions. Forecasting became automated and more precise, supporting budget accuracy and eliminating nearly a week of manual work. CCA helped prioritize high-impact cost-saving actions, making FinOps results both visible and measurable. The company is now advancing into a new phase, focused on automation of rightsizing and Start/Stop actions, as well as expanding FinOps culture through internal enablement initiatives.

Lessons learned

One of the most complex steps in the project was building Núclea’s Organizational Map, given the company’s multi-CNPJ structure and specific tax configurations. The process required close collaboration with internal finance and compliance teams to ensure that cloud spend was accurately mapped across business units and financial products. While time-consuming, the effort was critical to unlocking granular visibility and cost accountability. This experience now serves as a blueprint for future implementations in similar enterprise environments, allowing for a more agile and aligned setup from the start.

Next steps

• Expanding automation with Autofix, including rightsizing and scheduled start/stop actions
• Launching a company-wide FinOps education event to strengthen financial visibility and cost-efficiency culture across Núclea’s tech teams

ISV tool

• Lighthouse: Financial visibility, real-time dashboards, budgeting, forecasting, and product-level chargeback
• CCA: Identification of cost-saving opportunities and enforcement of FinOps best practices