The Background
Established over 34 years ago, humm group specialises in bigger ticket transactions for consumers and SMEs, with more than 2.7 million customers across Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland.
Since October 2022, Mantel Group has partnered closely with humm group to provide industry-leading cloud and digital expertise that will accelerate their modernisation and simplification journey on AWS.
In FY23, humm group delivered $75 million in normalised cash profit, post-tax. Their core product offering includes point-of-sale finance, credit cards and commercial lending. Technology capability underpins humm group’s services and products. Historically, the business has grown through acquisition and success in the market, so it inherited complexity across the technology, process and product layers of its business.
Over the last six years, a focus on simplification has reduced the product offering (from 27 products to 6), allowed for expansion into new global markets, and scaled up technology platforms to support hundreds of transactions a minute. For FY24, simplification continues to be a top priority to ensure the continued growth of the business is tightly coupled with foundational and operational capability. Customer experience remains at the heart of everything.
By consolidating assets and streamlining processes to be more in line with the end customer, humm Group will develop a more robust, profitable, and scalable business. A key component is the adoption and consolidation of platforms and operational capabilities on cloud, at scale.
humm Group & Mantel Group at AWS Industry Councils
humm Group and Mantel Group were invited to speak at AWS Industry Councils, with Client Principal Nick Denison explaining modernisation-at-scale, and some of the work that Mantel Group have undertaken in partnership with humm Group.
The Problem
“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, Humm Group
Key Strategic Drivers
The Solution
In collaboration with the team at humm group, Mantel Group have taken a phased approach to simplifying operations and platform capabilities on cloud. This included:
Key AWS Services
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Amazon EKS
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AWS Control Tower
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Amazon RDS
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AWS Security Hub
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AWS Network Firewall
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AWS GuardDuty
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Amazon Kinesis
“These technologies have not only streamlined operations but also empowered us to innovate and scale with agility. It’s gratifying to witness how these AWS services have become the cornerstone of their success story.”
Rhys Deimel | Lead Engineer, Mantel Group
“Together with the humm team and S2M (Select vendor), we created a proof of concept (PoC) in AWS using AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle integrated with S3 and EC2 instances. The goal of the PoC was to prove that we could replatform Select and Oracle from on-premises, which was running on Solaris, to an x86 architecture and take advantage of AWS RDS for Oracle, which would allow us to reduce the risk of their mission-critical workload. The PoC was successful and deployed using Terraform for IaC (Infrastructure as Code).”
Lee Drew | Lead Engineer, Mantel Group
“Through the abundance of services and capability AWS provides, we’re able to build and assemble our infrastructure to match our business. In other words, this flexibility means we don’t need to rework our world to get value from AWS – and AWS’s global footprint also aligns to our growth initiatives that span UK, Ireland, and Canada.”
Andrew Mason | Head of Infrastructure, Humm Group
Outcomes
“With the implementation of AWS EKS to host containerised workloads we were able to utilise the EKS Blueprints to configure complete Kubernetes Clusters as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with security and best practices bootstrapped and standardised across deployments. This enabled development teams to deploy across multiple environments with minimal differences on the infrastructure platform.”
Tony Hallworth | Lead AWS Engineer/Architect, Mantel Group
AWS Control Tower offered a straightforward way to set up and govern an AWS multi-account environment. AWS Control Tower orchestrates the capabilities of several other AWS Services, including AWS Organisations, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS IAM Identity Centre, and builds the landing zone for humm group to access AWS.
Beyond engineering build activities, it was essential to the success of this programme of work that Mantel Group embedded ourselves within humm group technology and operations teams. This allowed us to de-risk transition and handover phases of the engagement by performing iterative skills and process uplift activities, whilst delivering towards the core deliverables and outcomes of the programme.
Through the adoption and modernisation of cloud at scale, humm group have been able to achieve the following outcomes:
“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.”
