Executive summary Executive summary
Client background
Discovery Limited is a financial services group based in South Africa. The company is listed on Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) - the largest stock exchange in Africa. Discovery Limited provides a wide range of financial solutions to over 5 million clients, serving both businesses and individuals.
Business challenge
Discovery Limited is a large corporation that consists of several companies and specializes in a number of segments, including banking, insurance, healthcare, wellness, and investments. As the company has grown into a large corporation, they required more scalability and greater computing capacity. Thus, Discovery Limited needed to find a reliable partner to help them migrate to AWS. Besides, the company wanted to expand their customer base. They decided to develop a brand-new solution that would monitor the customers’ state of health on an ongoing basis and inspire people to adopt better lifestyle behaviors.
N-iX approach
N-iX gathered a team of experts with hands-on AWS expertise and started a project with a PoC to help the client define goals, estimate costs, and choose relevant technologies. We have performed an end-to-end cloud migration to AWS and developed a new product that would allow the client to reach more customers.
Value delivered
The N-iX team has helped the client build a new reward solution that encourages people to adopt better lifestyle behaviors. Also, N-iX experts have provided support in AWS cloud migration to help the client ensure better data governance, achieve high scalability, reduce costs, and more.
Success story in detail
Discovery Limited has cooperated with the N-iX team to develop a new solution to expand their services and engage new customers. Our experts have been responsible for calculating additional benefits for certain products in the investment segment. Our task is to develop REST APIs and design a pipeline for running, processing, and returning data to source databases.
Based on the confirmed data, Discovery Limited offers their customers additional bonuses or discounts on specific commissions. We work with a team that operates the accrual of all commissions, income, and income distribution among investment plans.
Another major challenge was related to the data that was stored and processed on-premises. Our client needed to find a centralized and unified approach to information management and move their infrastructure to the cloud. The client required profound Big Data and AWS expertise to ensure effective data governance, storage, organization, and accessibility.
The N-iX team has helped the client choose the most efficient AWS services and analyze costs. As our client wanted to move outdated data to S3, they needed to understand the benefits of this approach. Therefore, N-iX engineers have built the PoC for Atlas MongoDB migration to the cloud and are working on AWS DocumentDB PoC to choose the most efficient solution.
Together with the client's team, we have migrated OpenShift Kubernetes to Amazon EKS. When migrating on-premise resources to GitHub on AWS, we have created GitHub Actions, which allowed us to automate, customize, and execute software development workflows right in the repository.
The new Discovery product
The N-iX team helped develop a new product for Discovery Invest and Discovery Vitality. Our task included creating software triggered by Oracle, checking whether the client meets the program's conditions, providing bonuses, and sending this information back to Oracle and Discovery Vitality. For example, if customers do not withdraw funds from the account for a certain period of time, they are provided with additional bonuses. Customers are rewarded after 3 and 12 months if no withdrawals occur and they remain active members of Vitality programs. The program leverages insights from behavioral economics to incentivize healthy lifestyles through rewards, discounts, health-related information, and partnerships.
Migration from on-premises to AWS
Our client plans to move up to 90% of the infrastructure to the cloud. Together with the client's team, we have migrated OpenShift Kubernetes to Amazon EKS following the re-platform approach. The client used on-premise BitBucket which we have substituted with GitHub. We created GitHub Actions when migrating on-premise resources to GitHub on AWS.
The N-iX team has built a PoC for moving MongoDB to the cloud. Since the client had data which was not used on a daily basis, they wanted to move it to S3 and needed a more profound understanding of the benefits. We have completed the Atlas MongoDB PoC and are working on the AWS DocumentDB PoC to choose the best solution.
We have helped the client design and implement a clear migration plan, monitor the results, and optimize costs. We have built a PoC for moving MongoDB to the cloud, estimated future costs according to the customer's needs, and helped choose the most relevant services. The client is able to support a growing customer base and leverage the flexibility of the cloud.
We have collaborated on a new product development with Discovery Vitality and Discovery Invest. The product allows our client to provide additional bonuses to regular customers, and engage a larger number of new customers.
- Helped choose and adopt the best cloud migration strategy, which allowed the client to reduce operational overhead, reduce costs, enable autoscaling, etc.;
- Built a PoC for moving MongoDB to the cloud to estimate costs and mitigate risks;
- Helped develop a new product that will expand the customer base by nurturing existing customers and attracting new ones.