hummgroup modernises core market offerings and platforms to drive continued global growth
At a glance
Key takeaways
Reducing product offering from 27 to 6
expanding into new global markets
scaling up tech platforms to support hundreds of transactions per minute
Key AWS services
- Amazon EKS
- AWS Control Tower
- Amazon RDS
- AWS Security Hub
- AWS Network Firewall
- AWS GuardDuty
- Amazon Kinesis
From humble beginnings
hummgroup, founded over 34 years ago, specialises in high-value transactions for consumers and SMEs, serving over 2.7 million customers across the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. In FY23, hummgroup reported a $75 million normalised cash profit post-tax. Looking ahead, their priorities include further simplification, cloud adoption, and customer experience enhancement, to build a more scalable and profitable business model, ensuring continued growth and robust operational capabilities in the competitive financial services industry.
As AWS services partner of the year, Mantel Group has been providing hummgroup with AWS expertise since -DATE-, to help streamline streamline and reduce complexity across the technology, process and product layers of hummgroup’s business, and ensure the continued growth of the business is tightly aligned with foundational and operational capability in FY24 and beyond.
hummgroup outlined four key challenges that needed to be addressed
1
Disparate and duplicated systems, and no unified platform, causing implications and risks associated with security, operations, resiliency, scalability, and cost.
2
Increasing operational complexity, driven by the limitations of an on-premise environment, and increasing customer expectations driven by business growth.
3
Highly-complex modernisation on AWS requirements, eg. on-premise Oracle databases supporting key functions of BNPL and Cards platforms.
4
A lack of people capability, knowledge and experience in AWS, to ensure rapid modernisation aligned to best practices and security and compliance requirements.
“Our requirements and expectations over time have changed in-market due to our continued success and growth, but our foundational and technology base lagged behind.”
Andrew Mason
Head of Infrastructure, hummgroup
The Solution
In partnership with the team at hummgroup, Mantel Group have taken a phased approach to simplifying operations and platform capabilities on cloud. This includes:
1
The exit of core functionality from humm Group’s New Zealand Data Centre
2
Removal of legacy technologies, infrastructure and related costs
3
Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) platform modernisation on AWS, to assist the global rollout and growth of related payment plan products
4
Consolidation and uplift of platform capability, encompassing automation, scalability, security and compliance
5
Adoption of new ways of working to align with newly-formed foundational capabilities within the hummgroup team
Achieving outcomes together
To ensure the programme’s success, Mantel Group integrated deeply with humm Group’s technology and operations teams. This approach helped to mitigate common risks during transition and handover phases, by gradually enhancing skills, capabilities and processes, while continuously meeting the core deliverables and outcomes of the project.
Through the adoption and modernisation of cloud at scale, hummgroup have been able to achieve the following outcomes
Product growth
Underpinned by newly-developed capabilities in AWS, lowering the cost of experimentation and global expansion, humm Group now has the capability to deploy in a new region in 6 weeks.
Foundational capabilities
Unified and single platform capability that meets both current and future business requirements, powered by automation and AWS global infrastructure.
Security and compliance
Security codified and compliance aligned, ring-fenced environments, and architecture aligned to AWS best practices and business objectives.
Operational efficiencies and simplification
Architectures are standardised and pattern-based, and environments are pipeline-driven.
Governance
Real-time performance metrics and cost visibility, and guardrails embedded in pipelines.
“One of the outcomes we are most proud of is the growth of our people. Through modernisation of our key digital and infrastructure we are now able to remove roadblocks and provide tools that enable our people to move faster, experiment and bring new ideas to market at speed and lower cost”
Vaughan Dixon
CIO, hummgroup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P9TCx3Iqhk
AWS Industry Councils
hummgroup and Mantel Group were invited to speak at AWS Industry Councils, with Mantel Group Client Principal Nick Denison explaining modernisation-at-scale, and some of the work that Mantel Group have undertaken in partnership with hummgroup
Ready to get started?
Fill out the form to let us know how can we transform your business.
