NewDay reinvents its business model with new platform based on Azure Cosmos DB

A disrupter since its inception more than 20 years ago, NewDay revolutionized the credit industry in the United Kingdom by providing unsecured credit to a wide range of consumers in an inclusive and responsible way. Offering technology-enabled, highly flexible, and innovative products, NewDay is one of the UK’s largest providers of consumer credit, serving close to 5 million customers. Partnering with popular consumer brands such as John Lewis & Partners, Argos, and Deko, NewDay issues one in five UK credit cards and has improved the credit scores of approximately 2 million customers in 2022 alone. NewDay helps people move forward with credit, based on the belief that credit is a force for good and that responsible and accessible credit expands possibilities. Expert insight, data, and technology are what have made NewDay’s approach a success.

When NewDay considered its future, company leaders recognized that the organization was running and maintaining a single installation of its platform. The goal in those days was to convince individual High Street brands to come on board with NewDay to purchase credit products. As the company grew, cost, performance, and scaling of its platform became serious concerns. The first consideration was managing cost, but NewDay was also interested in instant scalability, low latency, global distribution, the highest-possible availability, and guaranteed performance at any scale. NewDay quickly realized that the financial marketplace had an appetite for technology that could enable the brands themselves to directly engage with customers and provide credit.

Rob Cooper, Distinguished Engineer at NewDay, said, “NewDay became famous because we could predict with relatively high accuracy whether subprime consumers would pay their bills. But that platform is locked into certain vendors’ products, limiting us from expanding overseas. Our goal is to take on more markets, and to provide more cloud-native solutions with predictable costs for our clients. This means a lot orchestration and adaptation as we build and integrate new solutions alongside existing products.” 

NewDay is building on its lending experience and the technology that supported its distinctive approach to providing credit. It is evolving its business to two companies: a new technology company that provides its platform to other financial institutions and its sister organization, NewDay Cards. 

Reinventing itself

NewDay has long harnessed the power of data to drive commerce across the UK, creating value at scale. Enabled by Azure Cosmos DB and other Azure applications, NewDay is providing tools and technology to support other companies’ building payment services and credit solutions. “It’s essential that our new platform remains compliant while still cost effective and scalable,” says Alessio Franceschelli, Senior Principal Engineer at NewDay. Franceschelli and Cooper collaborate closely and lead a team of engineers who are implementing and optimizing the updated platform solution.

Franceschelli said, “Azure Cosmos DB is easy to use, especially for loosely structured data, and enabled us to experiment and quickly add new types of data and domains. We’ve dealt with some growing pains as we rethought everything, and Azure Cosmos DB, which has long been part of our platform, was able to keep up with us.” 

Azure Cosmos DB is designed to provide high availability, scalability, low-latency access to data, and support for open source, enabling users to build modern, cloud-native apps effortlessly. For NewDay, the work involved rearchitecting the Azure Cosmos DB containers, achieving zero downtime, and using Azure Databricks to seamlessly migrate the container. NewDay was able to tailor the database to create an appropriate design for each of its different workloads and allocate resources where they were needed most. The organization is also taking advantage of autoscaling to achieve cost efficiency in Azure Cosmos DB. While other companies support selected workloads, NewDay is the only company offering an end-to-end platform solution for its financial institution customers.

“We require flexibility and cannot afford any downtime which would risk disabling customer quotations and customer onboarding,” says Cooper. “It’s been exciting that we can use tools such as Azure Databricks in an unobtrusive, safe way. We have high confidence in the migration, which came with zero downtime, especially since the platform is cloud native to Microsoft Azure.”

Acquisitions is a critical workload for NewDay as it orchestrates the application for a new account, managing workflows to lead to an application decision. Within such complex operations, every second counts. NewDay was able to achieve a market-leading response time thanks to the optimization made possible by Azure Cosmos DB. 

Cooper explained, “Our existing software had been working very well, but we’ve been growing and putting more demand on the system. Collaborating with the team at Microsoft enabled us to use Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Databricks to seamlessly and safely migrate while still at full production load. We are much better able to predict costs and count on high availability.”

Significant market progress

Franceschelli says, “Our first customer is ourselves—our sister company NewDay Cards. We want to ensure that we’re reaping the benefits of our updated and cost-optimized platform, and taking full advantage of the increased availability, greater speed, higher performance, and lower TCO. We also look forward to implementing new features.“

The new venture is already making noteworthy market progress. The NewDay platform is supporting an embedded financial partnership with landmark client Lloyds Banking Group for underwriting and technology and providing end-to-end technology to global retailer Boohoo for a new digital financial product. Additionally, the company is supplying data transformation, credit data modeling, and reporting suite capabilities to a large international bank through a strategic reseller partnership.

Find out more about NewDay on LinkedIn.