90% faster releases | < 1 hour full environment deployments | 75% improvement in triage time |
Executive Summary Momnt powers modern lending solutions for businesses to provide low-friction, affordable financing to their customers at the point-of-need. Momnt has achieved this by re-imagining consumer lending so that financial institutions can quickly and easily gain a share of the market. By utilizing API-based platforms, they creatively leverage alternative data sources and ML/AI-informed decisions to present real-time loan offers fit to each borrower. All of this is done within the banking industry’s current regulatory infrastructure. After many years in the cloud, Momnt was looking to revisit its application architecture, modernize its development workflow, improve security, and control overall costs. With Defiance Digital’s help, Momnt was able to meet these goals and better situate itself for future growth. |  INDUSTRY Financial Services USE CASE DevOps, Cloud Automation, Cloud Security, Cost Savings |
“This partnership helped us scale through more comprehensive cloud security, continuous cost optimization, application automation, and compliance. Throughout the partnership, Defiance Digital collaborated from concept to results and has been a valuable asset to our success.”
-Brian Lanehart, President & CTO, Momnt
The Challenge
Having re-imagined consumer lending, Momnt’s growth was outpacing its existing architecture and development process. There was an existing AWS
environment, but Momnt was looking to modernize this environment to ease the development team’s testing and release process. In addition, this modernization would help plan for anticipated (and unanticipated) growth and new requirements while being cost-conscious to not end up with massive AWS
cost overruns.
To accelerate this project, Momnt was looking for a managed cloud operations and managed security provider to re-architect and develop a new solution to
modernize their operations. Understanding they didn’t have all the necessary technical expertise or time to take on such a project, Momnt approached Defiance Digital for a solution. The complete project included the design and implementation of a production-ready AWS environment utilizing modern AWS services, along with a new Infrastructure as Code (IaC) CI/CD pipeline. The project would demand a long-term partnership to manage the environment, security,
compliance, and observability to provide guidance and update enhancements as Momnt’s customer base continued to grow.
The Defiance Solution
Working side-by-side with Defiance Digital, Momnt determined that there were five key areas of focus for this project to design and implement architectures and new processes:
Improve automation with new Infrastructure as Code (IaC) pipelines
Modernize existing AWS Architecture for growth and cost savings
Provide robust security solutions
Implement modern application monitoring and observability
Maintain continuous compliance
Improve Automation with Managed Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Pipelines
With an existing development pipeline in use, Momnt was looking to improve by moving to a modern trunk-based IaC solution. As a new 10-stage development pipeline was introduced, Defiance supported Momnt with their development concerns in deploying pull requests to one of their many new QA environments. The result of this allowed all QA team members to have their own siloed testing
environments for verifying features without blocking the development of others. While releasing code to production was previously a weekly or longer process,
code can now be released as frequently as daily.
Modernize Cloud Architecture for Scale and Cost Savings
When reviewing their existing architecture, improvements were made in several areas to optimize the overall configuration. Spot instances for the cluster were introduced, simplifying the overall network design, reducing overall costs, and adding flexibility to the new deployment process. Additionally, better monitoring of resource utilization allowed the right-sizing of resources.
Provide Robust Security Solutions
Security is a major focus for any business and the lending industry is no exception. With Defiance’s suite of security and observability tools, we are continuously monitoring and logging the entire environment for any anomalies or new threats.
Modern Application Observability
Along with reliable uptime and resource monitoring, an important decision in partnering with Defiance is almost always cost containment. Attempting to
maintain a cloud solution on your own can quickly result in costs and complexity unexpectedly growing. With Defiance’s managed observability, overall resource usage can be kept in check so that third party cloud costs are controlled.
Continuous Compliance
Compliance is a key part of any financial institution due to various regulatory and security requirements. Working with Defiance, Momnt is meeting current
SSAE18 SOC controls and is well-situated for future compliance assessments. With Defiance’s assistance, compliance will be continually maintained with
successful 3rd party assessments.
Results
At the conclusion of the project, Momnt benefited from a modern, highly scalable, highly available secure solution to meet their current and future growth. The foundational architecture and newly developed CI/CD pipelines allowed for them to easily stage and deploy application releases without delay or significant infrastructure interaction. Defiance's Managed Cloud solution pulled together AWS best practices, robust security and compliance infrastructure, and state-of-the-art observability and monitoring to provide a resilient solution that is
extensible, cost-effective, and scalable.
As Momnts’ number of lenders and consumers continues to grow along with the ongoing support and partnership from Defiance Digital, Momnt will be well-placed in the industry with leading-edge solutions to continue its growth in the lending market.
About Momnt Technologies
Momnt powers modern lending solutions for businesses to provide low-friction, affordable financing to their customers at the point of need. Our API-based platforms creatively leverage alternative data sources and ML/AI-informed decisioning to present real-time loan offers fit to each individual borrower, all done within the banking industry’s current regulatory infrastructure. Momnt has reimagined consumer lending so that financial institutions can quickly and easily gain share of the market; by offering downstream credit through existing business customer relationships or the Momnt network, they drive demand for local businesses’ goods and services and meet consumers where they are. Learn more about Momnt at www.momnt.com