Transforming Industry

12 13 Leveraging the public cloud Vida Homeloans (‘Vida’), a trading style of Belmont Green Finance Limited, is a specialist mortgage lender that works exclusively with expert intermediary partners. Launched in 2016, Vida now has over 10,700 borrowers and 160 employees and more than £2 billion lent in mortgage assets. The company has also successfully completed five securitizations worth almost £2 billion. Vida needed to update its plans for an online broker portal that was intended to bring together elements of automated decision making and human underwriting to gauge risk and make recommendations. Having previously abandoned a private cloud strategy, the company wanted the ability to manage its public cloud transformation with a longer and more deliberate view and decided on Microsoft Azure. By leveraging the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure, Vida could also easily establish and maintain the controls that are required to operate in the United Kingdom’s financial services sector. Representatives of Cognizant Microsoft Business Group (MBG) met with several members of Vida’s executive team to understand their business requirements. Over a four-month period, workshops were held with key stakeholders to shape their vision. Cognizant MBG led the Azure transition during an ambitious three-month setup phase. “With the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure, we could master issues like authentication, security and performance and still switch on new services and features at a rapid pace; we launched our first production workload, a data analytics platform, within six weeks of setup,” says David Flashman, director of Technology at Vida. In future, the company plans to explore other Azure resources, such as data analytics, AI, and Azure Machine Learning. Read the full case study > FINANCIAL SERVICES MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS Digital core for Jurassic Established in 2018 and acquired by Fern Trading Limited in February 2021, Jurassic Fibre is conducting a £250 million fiber roll-out in the United Kingdom. Based in the Southwest of England, where demand for faster, more reliable broadband is high, Jurassic Fibre identified the need for a cloud platform that would act as a single source of truth for all employee information while keeping pace with business expansion. The firm’s wish list included fully automated service fulfillment, service assurance and billing processes and the ability to meet the evolving requirements of a multi-vendor network. Given Jurassic Fibre’s heavy investment in Microsoft cloud platforms, Microsoft Dynamics 365 HR was selected for the workforce transformation program. Microsoft partner TCS installed its Next Generation HOBS SaaS Platform, which now provides the digital core for the company’s services. The HOBS subscription management platform solution met Jurassic Fibre’s requirement for quick onboarding of customers for its roll-out of ultrafast broadband in previously under-served areas. The TCS HOBS architecture also helped the firm to integrate with multiple vendors by creating flexible processes suited to manual, tactical, and fully automated processes. The cloud HR platform deployed by TCS brought together disparate employee processes at Jurassic Fibre and enabled the use of data analytics for visibility on employee demographics. The solution is an end-to- end, modular, SaaS platform whose key capabilities include product portfolio management, digital customer engagement, collaborative selling, contract management, dynamic orchestration, revenue management, partner management, device management, network inventory management, and assurance. “We see TCS’s cloud-based HOBS platform, combined with the expertise and commitment of the TCS team, as the right foundation to realize our vision,” says Michael Maltby, CEO of Jurassic Fibre. Read the full case study >