Pennies: Modernising the micro‑donation ecosystem to scale social impact

Industry

Introduction

NashTech worked in close partnership with Pennies through a series of structured workshops, deep-dive discovery sessions, and collaborative design activities. Together, we mapped the existing end-to-end processes, uncovered pain points, identified game changing features and shaped a phased delivery roadmap that prioritised value and reduced risk.

Introduction

For more than 15 years, Pennies has helped turn everyday transactions into moments of generosity. By enabling customers to donate a few pennies at checkout, Pennies has created a simple, affordable way for people to give, while helping retailers and payment providers demonstrate their social purpose.

But behind the scenes, the charity’s technology platform had begun to show its age. As Pennies’ network of partners, merchants and charities continued to grow, its legacy systems became increasingly manual and difficult to scale. To protect the integrity of every donation and unlock future growth, Pennies partnered with NashTech to modernise its core processing platform and build a foundation fit for the next phase of its mission.

Overview

Pennies is a charity dedicated to expanding the power of micro‑donations in the UK and internationally. Acting as a digital upgrade to the traditional charity box, Pennies works with merchants and payment providers to offer customers a seamless, optional way to donate a few pence during everyday transactions, enabling businesses to express their social purpose and helping charities amplify their impact. Together with its partners, Pennies is creating a legacy of digital micro-giving.

Business challenge

Pennies’ core donation processing system, known internally as PODS, had served the charity well for over a decade. However, as Alison Hutchinson, CEO of Pennies, explains, “it had become older technology, heavily reliant on specialist knowledge and manual intervention, and increasingly difficult to maintain and extend”.

As the number of participating merchants, charities, and technology partners continued to grow, Pennies faced increasing pressure on its legacy systems.

This created several critical challenges:

Time‑consuming, manual processing: Staff had to manually take in files, reconcile large volumes of data each week, and produce a large volume of reports as well as responding to frequent, ad hoc data requests.
Scattered data and slow reporting: Information lived in different places, so creating reports for merchants, technology partners and charities took lots of hands‑on work and didn’t scale.
Hard to scale: The older system wasn’t built to handle a growing number of merchants, charities and partners across an increasingly international landscape.
Limited visibility: Because it took time to generate insight, it was harder to get a clear view of performance and spot opportunities for growth.

Pennies needed a modern, reliable, and scalable foundation, one that reduced operational friction, improved data consistency, positioned the charity for long-term expansion and the ability to take advantage of the benefits of AI.

The solution

Key elements of our approach included:

Co‑design with stakeholders: Bringing operational, technical, and business teams together to ensure shared understanding and alignment.
Iterative delivery: Responding rapidly to requests, introducing improvements gradually while maintaining stability of the existing platform.
Clear communication and governance, building trust: Regular reviews and open collaboration fostered confidence and transparency throughout the project.
Future‑ready planning: Ensuring all enhancements support Pennies’ long‑term digital transformation ambitions.

This approach ensured that Pennies had full visibility and hands on access to the evolving solution and confidence in each stage of delivery.

NashTech delivered a modernised and more capable version of the Pennies core processing platform, refreshed, resilient, and designed for the demands of a rapidly scaling organisation. This foundation enables enterprise integration architecture, data warehouse and customer portal to deliver transformational value to merchants, charities and technology partners – all driving social impact to people that need it.

Alison, Pennies CEO, said:

“Working closely with Pennies, NashTech translated our challenges into a phased modernisation roadmap, delivering a more resilient and scalable platform while protecting the accuracy of every donation”.

Highlights of the solution include:

Platform modernisation

Upgraded PODS Windows Application to supported .NET Framework 4.8, ensuring long‑term maintainability.
Built new API services (AWS Fargate) to expose core functionality through modern REST interfaces.

Intelligent automation

Implemented AWS Lambda ETL jobs for automated:

Donation file ingestion and validation
Salesforce synchronisation
Sage Intacct integration

Robust data architecture

Leveraged Amazon RDS (SQL Server) as an operational database for streamlined processing.
Introduced a separate Reporting Database to support analytics and advanced insights.
Utilised SFTP and Amazon S3 for secure storage of donation files, reports, and build packages.

Improved user access and authentication

Enabled secure external user authentication via AWS Cognito.
Introduced Azure Entra ID for internal SSO, simplifying access while enhancing security.

Foundation for new customer and partner portals

Designed and prepared infrastructure for upcoming merchant, technology partner and charity portals, allowing future self‑service capabilities and real‑time insights leveraging AWS Quick Suite.

Throughout the transition, to guarantee a smooth transition, both legacy and modernised systems ran in parallel to validate accuracy, ensure reliability, and minimise operational risk.

Results and achievements

Pennies now operates on a modern, more scalable technology foundation supporting its significant growth potential and mission to increase social impact. Introducing the hyperscale platform as part of this work has been a critical step to unlocking access to AI and a range of tools that will make a further, significant, transformative impact to the entire Pennies business.

Key outcomes include:

Reduced manual effort through automated file handling, reconciliation, and reporting.
Faster processing times, increasing operational efficiency and responsiveness.
Improved data clarity, enabling better decision-making and performance tracking.
Enhanced reliability and resilience, supporting Pennies’ expanding partner network.
Clear pathway to self-service portals, unlocking future capabilities for merchants, charities, and technology partners.

With its renewed platform, Pennies can scale confidently, innovate faster, and continue amplifying the impact of micro‑donations across the UK and beyond.