Core systems transformation delivers agility and creates foundation for Home Credit’s global expansion
/ Home Credit saw huge opportunities for growth in new markets, and needed robust systems that would rapidly scale to meet their expansion ambitions.
/ Over the last 20 years, EmbedIT has worked with Home Credit to deliver highly flexible, high-performance systems that are both robust and user friendly.
/ As a result, Home Credit has become, and remains, the number one consumer finance company in the markets it operates in.
Location
Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Kazakhstan, China, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Philippines
Expertise
Custom development & Product development
Business transformation
Digital transformation
Data management
Oracle / JAVA
The challenge:
The need to expand
Today, Home Credit Group is an international consumer finance provider offering a range of digitalised credit and insurance services in many of the biggest marketplaces around the world, including China, and India.
The company started two decades ago in the Czech Republic, providing a number of product financing options for citizens who wanted to buy newly available consumer goods but had little or no savings. The company was highly successful in developing a consumer lending proposition that harnessed the emotional power of consumer behaviour, backed with strong business systems to support its financial lending models.
The company’s Czech-based IT development team, now EmbedIT, enabled this through a technology stack that included a central Oracle-based development ecosystem for backend processing, while a large workforce delivered front end functionality – mostly through point of sales in stores, or via a collections teams.
The EmbedIT team quickly learned that Home Credit’s systems needed to be fast and flexible: remaining a marketplace leader depended on being able to beat the competition to market with new propositions and products. It was also essential that the systems were high performance and robust enough to seamlessly process large numbers of customers and transactions, using fully digital processes to dramatically reduce loan approval waiting times and increase customer satisfaction.
As Home Credit grew, it looked to expand beyond the Czech borders, having identified huge opportunities in countries undergoing similar economic changes, including Russia and China. But with exponentially bigger populations and growth rates, and complex economic systems, the company knew it would need to upgrade its systems to successfully expand operations. The Oracle-based system used in the Czech Republic, although highly reliable and high performance, simply didn’t have the built-in levels of usability or flexibility that would be needed in these new markets.
The solution
Phase 1: Supporting growth through geography
To support Home Credit’s objectives to reach new markets, EmbedIT kicked off a major upgrade project. First, the team delivered a new IT architecture strategy that brought together elements from the latest technologies and methodologies of the time, to create a new, integrated enterprise solution.
Oracle – the workhorse of the Czech system – remained in place for data storage, but was augmented with a new business logic middleware layer using more modern tools based on Java and its extensive library options for maximum flexibility. In underwriting, for example, the speed and sophistication of decisions was unheard of in the marketplace – and remains unrivalled.
These two bottom layers created a solid foundation that not only enabled a user-friendly web front end that rates highly against the competition, but was also forward looking, with support for a huge variety of other future options including mobile apps, and integration into third party applications in stores and online.
Over the next few years, the system was used to accelerate the expansion of Home Credit into countries including India, Philippines and Vietnam, with each market requiring elements of configuration to meet specific needs.
Phase 2: Supporting growth through consolidation
The second major phase of the Home Credit project came a few years later, when the EmbedIT team began to leverage the additional opportunities that would come from a new architecture strategy based on modularisation. This forward-looking structure not only enabled greater system resiliency, but also enabled new functionality – or adaptations for each market – to be very quickly added and implemented without any impact on core system code.
This sophisticated parameterisation system paid back significantly during the Covid pandemic, when it wasn’t possible to organise collections in-person. Home Credit was able to keep its leadership position in the marketplace simply changing the collections parameters, maintaining them almost effortlessly and without the need for significant project development.
“EmbedIT has been a part of Home Credit since the beginning and is intrinsic to us becoming a world leader in consumer finance. From IT strategy to implementation, delivery and reporting, the EmbedIT team has delivered us unrivalled business agility, with systems that are flexible, high performance yet user friendly. They’ve delivered, and continue to deliver, real business impact”
Radek Pluhař
CEO, Home Credit Group
The Benefits
Today, Home Credit, supported by EmbedIT, is the number one provider of consumer finance services in most of the markets it operates in. Working with EmbedIT has delivered:
/ Robust, flexible and high performance systems.
In the fast-moving consumer finance marketplace, the platform and combination of tools delivered by EmbedIT has given Home Credit operational resilience, compliance with local laws, and the ability to quickly adopt and roll out new products and services to meet customer demands.
/ Real customer focus.
With systems that are user friendly, and support customisation and personalisation, Home Credit can now service its customers in the way they want – in person, online or through mobile apps. And with leading-edge solutions such as biometric identification, more business can be delivered through online channels, creating cost and time savings for Home Credit.
/ Unrivalled business agility.
An approach to IT systems that enables business foresight – with the ability to react to planned and unexpected changes. With Home Credit increasingly needing fully digital solutions, EmbedIT has helped to create solutions that move the company away from manual processes that were restricting this growth.
/ Sustainable long term solutions.
By prioritising future growth as a core part of solution delivery, EmbedIT has delivered Home Credit a technology solution that will scale with them.
