hummgroup set to drive efficient global growth.

hummgroup has been at the forefront of the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) market in Australia for around 30 years. The business continues to revolutionise the way people pay with solutions like the humm BNPL platform, bundll BNPL payment app, and humm90 credit card which offers flexible, personal payment terms.

Headquartered in Australia, hummgroup has expanded over the years and now has operations in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada. The business’ next level of growth depends on its continued and efficient expansion. That’s why it’s established a global technology template that will reduce the time and cost of scaling into new markets.

The solution was built with support from Salesforce Professional Services and developed in just 21 weeks to support the launch of hummgroup in Canada. It combines Salesforce and Q2 loan origination from the AppExchange to manage the end-to-end relationship with customers and merchants.

In the past, each of hummgroup’s global entities was powered by different technologies. These included Salesforce which the team in Ireland rolled out in 2017.

As the business grew and certain technologies reached end of life, hummgroup took the opportunity to cut costs and complexity by consolidating systems. It wanted one trusted platform that would meet the needs of every market and help drive efficient growth. It chose Salesforce and Q2 as the two combined to allow the business to manage the buyer and seller experience from a single platform, including processes like contract and account management. A rigorous proof of concept also assured hummgroup the solution could scale.

“As we looked for a solution, we looked at providers who could help us go global and increase our speed to market. Our industry is changing and we need to move quickly, so the ability to build something once and deploy it multiple times across the globe is really important,” said Dixon. “Salesforce and Q2 also provided 80% of the capabilities we needed, meaning we just had to add what was unique for our business.”

hummgroup decided to deploy the solution in the United Kingdom first. Then, as this project was nearly complete, it engaged Salesforce Professional Services to roll it out in Canada. This involved taking and enhancing what had already been built and customising it to the needs of the local market. The Professional Services team also collaborated with Perfutil, who developed the front-end customer onboarding portal.

“Our engagement with Professional Services was especially critical in those early phases of the project as we lacked Salesforce capability internally and were very much reliant on help from the specialists,” said Alan Yeo, Head of Digital Innovation Delivery, hummgroup.

Salesforce now provides hummgroup a complete view of merchants and customers while Q2 serves as its core product system, managing the product ledger, contract management, payments, and account management as well as the purchase lifecycle.

Heroku automatically syncs data between Salesforce and Q2 and also between Salesforce and hummgroup’s customer-facing apps. Heroku simplifies the development of these apps and makes scaling easy which is important in the retail space where significant sales or events create peaks in demand.

The solution also encompasses Experience Cloud which underpins new portals for merchants and customers. With pre-built components like dashboards and reports, new portals are faster to build and wow customers with a better user experience.

Salesforce Platform Flow helps to extend and augment functionality around the management of customers, cases, and contracts. Flow also provides intuitive, guided experiences around tasks like onboarding new merchants.

Salesforce Privacy Centre, Shield, and Data Mask all help to ensure security and protect customer data from any potential breach. Privacy Centre specifically helps hummgroup manage large volumes of customer data in a way that complies with various regional regulations. Together with Shield— used for encryption—Privacy Centre will also help hummgroup adhere to new compliance requirements anticipated in Australia as BNPL comes under new regulations in the future.

Leveraging the support of Salesforce Professional Services and the team’s platform expertise, hummgroup deployed all this in just 21 weeks to support the launch of its Canadian business.

The Professional Services team has also helped templatise’ the solution so that it can quickly be rolled out to current and future entities. This has involved encapsulating business functionality into packages that can be deployed to various regions with a layer of configuration to align with regional needs.

“Speed to value is the dream. Technology should not be a blocker to entering new markets; it should be even easier and faster to go live than it is to find a new office,” said Andy Barnes, Head of Architecture, hummgroup.

Barnes added that the right security controls were essential to innovating and scaling fast in a heavily regulated industry. “We’re a BNPL provider, but we also do credit cards and other interest-bearing products. So we are regulated and we have to do our PCI DSS [Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard] and PII [Personally Identifiable Information], and all the good stuff. We really like to build security from the ground up and embed it within our organisation.”

hummgroup plans to extend its use of Salesforce to streamline customer support and optimise engagement. Service Cloud will replace around eight disparate systems to provide the contact centre team with a single view of customers and merchants. The contact management software will also increase the efficiency of support by reducing the time spent moving between different systems and screens. 

Marketing Cloud will power personalised lifecycle communication for both customers and merchants. These will include messages triggered in real-time based on customer and merchant behaviour.

“The key advantage of Marketing Cloud is that it’s tightly coupled with our customer data which means we will be able to personalise communication in real-time,” said Yeo.

Time saved on activities like customer support and communication will contribute to estimated productivity gains of more than 12%.

The business expects to derive additional value from Salesforce as it rolls it out across more entities and uses it to power new offerings. This includes an upcoming white-label solution with a major partner.

“One of the things I like about Salesforce is that there are always new features coming out and we can take advantage of these quite easily. That is part of what’s next for us and one of the ways we’ll start to see more value from the platform,” said Barnes.