Every day, frontline workers including the NHS, emergency services, armed forces, social care and teaching community, dedicate their lives to helping others. To recognise and reward them for everything they do, Blue Light Card, the UK’s leading rewards and discount service, offers a variety of exclusive discounts and savings for a small membership fee.
The organisation had ambitious aims to deepen its member impact, and to improve operational resilience. However, unable to achieve this with its legacy technology platform, Blue Light Card embarked on an ambitious cloud transformation, with the ultimate aim of increasing the total value of savings for its members.
Challenge
Blue Light Card’s core technology was based in an on-premises data centre and the ecosystem had grown organically as the business grew. The complexity of this legacy tech stack meant new products and services had often been created as standalone systems. By rebuilding its core tech platform in AWS, Blue Light Card hoped to lay the foundations for its next phase of growth.
The key aims for the migration were:
- Scalability: Improve application resilience and performance at peak times, and provide the groundwork to support new products, services, and territories
- Innovation: Enable nimbler product and service development, by a) providing the tech foundations for innovation, and b) removing data centre overheads that were consuming excessive amounts of team time
- Unification: Bring together all Blue Light Card brands and territories on a centralised technology platform, for ease of maintenance and development
- Security: Enhance security and member experience, by upgrading to a modern authentication system
Blue Light Card brought in Instil, to support delivery of this high-profile transformation programme.
Approach
Over the course of the cloud transformation, we provided a range of skills and seniority levels to help Blue Light Card shape and drive forward the modernisation. This ultimately helped the business complete the migration on-schedule, with all strategic functionality rebuilt using cloud-native technologies and approaches.
We helped Blue Light Card deliver by providing:
- Senior technical, architectural, and programme management advisory, to work with Blue Light Card’s C-suite and technology leaders to refine the technology platform and shape the team required to support it
- Experienced delivery managers for key workstreams, running both Instil and multi-supplier teams
- Full multi-disciplinary delivery teams, to autonomously deliver and integrate important parts of the programme
- Individuals to fill critical skills gaps in multi-supplier teams
- Comprehensive handover to BLC technical staff, to support the creation of a high-performing in-house engineering team
The level of our involvement continually flexed, in response to Blue Light Card’s needs and feedback. And while our teams were involved in many aspects of the migration, particular technical highlights included:
- Authentication system upgrade and unification: We brought users from a variety of bespoke authentication systems onto a single, modern Auth0 platform
- Improving application performance: We redeveloped the most popular part of the Blue Light Card service – where key workers browse and choose offers. The main aim was to substantially improve performance and resilience, particularly at peak times such as Black Friday
- Built APIs to serve the core experience: We created cloud-native APIs to underpin central parts of the Blue Light Card platform. These are key to its expansion and innovation plans
Impact
The cloud transformation has had an immediate impact for Blue Light Card and its members, resulting in marked increases across KPIs, including its top-priority member savings goals.
- Pace of innovation increased: Thanks to the new technology platform and the freeing up of team time, Blue Light Card released the first new features within eight weeks of going live in the cloud and has continued to innovate since.
- Performance and resilience improved: The platform responsively scales to meet peak demand from users. On the first Black Friday post-modernisation, which saw record usage, members enjoyed 100% application uptime and performance that exceeded all KPIs.
- Business expansion unlocked: The platform’s scalability and exceptional performance under high loads mean Blue Light Card can confidently launch new products and services.
- A high-performing team in place: Blue Light Card now has an in-house team with the skills to support and innovate on its cloud platform – enabled in part by Instil’s comprehensive knowledge-sharing.
- Higher member engagement achieved: Year-on-year data shows a marked uptick in member engagement with Blue Light Card’s products and services.
All of this has combined to support the delivery of a record milestone: £500 million in member savings over a 12-month period.
We used to have 15-20 engineers just keeping the lights on for us. Now we only need four, meaning we’ve much more resource available to build new products and services to better serve our members.
Khalil Dimachkie, CTO, Blue Light Card
Within months of the transformation, Blue Light Card had reached levels of performance and member savings that were previously unattainable.
Instil played a central role in delivering the cloud transformation that unlocked these and other benefits – imagine what we could do for your business.
Have you got aspirations to modernise technology, to unleash rapid business growth? Let’s talk about how we can help you deliver.