Fairstone Bank reduces major incidents by 41% and speeds innovation with Dynatrace

Fairstone Bank is an alternative lending provider, with roots in Canadian loans for nearly a century. Following its divestment from Citibank in 2017, the bank migrated all of its infrastructure to AWS and adopted a serverless architecture to accelerate digital growth through a modern technology stack.

As the journey progressed, Fairstone accumulated more than 1,500 AWS Lambda functions powering its digital services. With multiple tools supporting the different layers of its technology stack, Fairstone recognized the need for a unified platform that could provide a real-time, end-to-end view of application and systems behavior. The goal was to establish a single source of truth that enables developers and engineers to trace requests across services, connect performance issues directly to code-level root cause, and reduce the time spent manually stitching together telemetry during incident investigations.

Working with Arctiq, an IT and managed services provider, Fairstone implemented Dynatrace as a foundation for unified observability. With Dynatrace, Fairstone consolidated four monitoring tools previously used for application performance, log management, tracing, and session replay into one platform. This unified approach provides full-stack, context-rich visibility—from frontend user interactions through backend services, APIs, and serverless compute (AWS Lambda). Engineers can now follow transactions end-to-end, visualize service dependencies automatically, and understand how changes in code or infrastructure impact real user experience.

With the managed services support from Arctiq, Fairstone onboarded all of its applications within just three days, accelerating time to value and enabling teams to immediately begin instrumenting and analyzing their systems.

“Before Dynatrace we were drowning in information, but when we needed answers – we weren’t able to build a narrative to solve the puzzle,” said Patrice Laplante, Director, Software Engineering, Fairstone Bank. “The profound realization we had with Dynatrace was the confidence that it gives our teams when they’re faced with a problem. For the first time, our teams can see cause and effect in the same place, so they can understand what they need to do to resolve an issue before it impacts our customers.”

• Reduced incidents: Fairstone has reduced major incidents by 41%, eliminating the need for large, resource-intensive crisis calls that previously brought together up to 20 people to diagnose issues. With improved visibility and proactive alerting, teams can now identify and address problems earlier, often before they escalate.

• Accelerated development: Fairstone has increased development velocity by around 15%, with engineering teams able to move faster thanks to clearer insight into application performance. Adoption within Fairstone’s development team was accelerated through collaborative efforts, including hackathons that brought them together to integrate their applications into Dynatrace. Arctiq provided further support, helping to unblock challenges and drive rapid onboarding for team members looking to get started with Dynatrace.

• Faster issue resolution: Dynatrace has significantly reduced mean time to resolution through automated alerts and workflows. Fairstone’s teams can now debug and identify the root cause of incidents much faster, allowing services to be restored more quickly and minimizing disruption to the business.

• Proactive issue detection: By capturing business events in Dynatrace, Fairstone can track key operational flows, including activity in merchant applications. Teams can now detect when user activity drops below the normal expected levels and proactively investigate to determine whether there is a technical issue. This enables earlier intervention, reduces business disruption, and ensures critical workflows continue to operate as expected.

“Within a day of Dashboard onboarding, we had dashboards built for every key application,” said Annie-Johanne Deegan, VP, Software Engineering, Fairstone Bank. “That shifted the conversation from system performance to business impact, giving teams the context they needed to make faster, more informed decisions and get the full value of Dynatrace from day one.”