Background
Novuna is one of the UK's most trusted financial services providers, supporting over 1.2 million customers and managing £4.5bn in assets. Its digital estate, consisting of nine enterprise websites and responsive applications, plays a critical role in enabling customers to access financial products, manage services, and engage with Novuna's consumer and business brands.
The estate had grown organically, but was showing its age - there was end-of-life technology across several sites which created risk, inconsistent architectures, operational inefficiency, and availability was regularly falling below 99.5%. Slow delivery cycles meant new customer journeys took months to reach the market, and internal teams couldn't make content changes without raising a developer request.
Novuna needed a partner who could stabilise what existed, modernise the platform, and build the foundations for continuous improvement and long-term growth.
Solution
The project began with a forensic discovery and onboarding process, working closely with Novuna's commercial, marketing and IT teams to understand the digital estate, business goals and technical constraints in full.
We migrated all of the sites to the latest version of Umbraco and optimised the Azure infrastructure to support CI/CD pipelines, improve performance and strengthened security. To address the availability challenge, we architected a multi-region, geo-redundant Azure environment with automated failover, geo-redundant backups and a 24/7 monitoring and support model, with P1 incident response typically achieved in under ten minutes.
We developed a suite of reusable CMS components and design patterns that allow Novuna's marketing teams to build sophisticated, accessible customer journeys without developer intervention, reducing time-to-market and freeing up development resource for higher-value work. The platform also integrates with key third-party systems including Salesforce via Umbraco Forms, fleet management tools, and co-branded services such as an EV leasing portal with RAC.
Impact
The partnership quickly evolved into a long-term digital programme, spanning new Umbraco sites for Vehicle Solutions & Personal Finance, an EV Hub and Fleet Portal for major customers, a full rebrand from Hitachi Capital to Novuna, and ongoing Continuous Improvement programmes across the estate.
The results speak for themselves: 99.99% platform uptime against an SLA of 99.95%, infrastructure costs reduced by 40%, and delivery timescales for complex new websites cut from several months to as little as two weeks. The platform now mitigates approximately 23,000 security threats daily, and Novuna's marketing teams can build and launch digital experiences independently.
“When it comes to Umbraco or Azure web services, Shout's expertise and knowledge is second to none. In the last 3 years I’ve engaged and worked with exceptionally talented developers and project managers, who are invested and feel like an extension of the Novuna team. Shout are very proactive, they deliver exceptional service with positive outcomes.”
