humm is a leading non-bank financial services company, founded in 1991 in Sydney, Australia. With a global presence across the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and Canada, the group serves over 2.7 million customers.
humm offers a broad range of financial products, including buy now, pay later (BNPL) services, unsecured loans, credit cards, and business financing solutions. From everyday essentials to major life expenses like home renovations and medical treatments, humm’s diverse product ecosystem supports a wide range of consumer and business needs.
humm UK launched in 2021 and is authorised and regulated by the FCA, providing unsecured loans up to £30,000. The company has been steadily growing its partnerships with a wide range of retailers, from small businesses to large well-known brands. With their innovative financial solutions and growing market presence, the company is well on its way to achieving their goal of becoming a key player in the UK’s retail finance space.
The Challenge
Soon after entering the market, humm UK sought to improve the functionality and flexibility of their decisioning processes to meet their expanding needs. Their goal was to implement a solution that could handle more complex affordability assessments that integrated data from multiple sources. They also required a system that allowed them to quickly and independently adjust rulesets to keep pace with their expansion. Overall, improving operational efficiency and scalability was key, as they needed a decision engine capable of handling increasing application volumes with ease.
The Solution
humm UK partnered with LendingMetrics to implement our multi-award-winning Auto Decision Platform (ADP), which proved to be the decision engine they needed. Their team valued our expertise in the implementation stage, noting that many providers simply offered a licence, whereas we assisted with the build. Our disruptive pricing was another critical factor, particularly for a company new to the UK market looking to grow.
A key benefit we offered was ADP’s Self-Serve Functionality, which enabled their team to make changes to decisioning rules independently and efficiently. This eliminated the delays they previously experienced, where even simple adjustments required lengthy, time-consuming change requests. Another standout feature of ADP was the ability to easily reutilise data, this has helped humm UK save costs by avoiding multiple charges from customer’s repeated applications.
Our platform also introduced advanced data-handling capabilities, such as combining multiple data sources into a single ruleset. This was crucial for humm UK, as it enabled them to build a more comprehensive affordability framework by using data from both credit and affordability reports. They also highlighted the value of the Open Banking data integrated within ADP, fully utilising it to significantly reduce the need for manual intervention and improve application-to-loan times. As a result, humm UK has been able to make better use of their data to improve acceptance rates, delivering good outcomes by ensuring more customers can access the financial services they need.
ADP has assisted humm UK to manage higher volumes of applications and confidently improve their acceptance rate. Although they have not yet used ADP to its full potential, they look forward to leveraging it further to refine and develop their decisioning process, knowing the software can scale alongside their business growth.
We have confidence in the system, and that will continue to grow as we bring on new partners and retailers.
The Future
Looking ahead, humm UK plans to continue optimising its use of LendingMetrics’ ADP to further automate processes and enhance decision-making. The company is exploring the integration of additional data sources and improving its open banking solutions to increase acceptance rates and deliver faster, more accurate decisions.
We are excited to continue supporting humm UK in their journey, helping them scale with confidence as they embrace new innovations and strengthen their position in the retail finance sector.
We have been very impressed with LendingMetrics and would not hesitate to recommend them. From where we are as a business and what we’ve implemented, I can’t fault them and do not regret our decision to work with them.
