Blue Light Card
Accelerating BLC’s technology modernisation to unlock new growth
About Blue Light Card (BLC)
Blue Light Card (BLC) is the UK’s leading discount and rewards platform for emergency service workers, NHS staff, social care workers, and armed forces personnel, serving over 5 million members. Having experienced significant growth, BLC attracted private equity backing to support its ongoing expansion in the UK and internationally. The technology underpinning their platform, built in 2007, was creaking and becoming a bottleneck to their ambitious scaling plans. In 2024 they embarked on a moderniation programme, migrating to Amazon Web Services and re-platforming legacy systems to enhance their performance, reliability, and future scalability.
Project summary
Loomery led the delivery of this complex modernisation programme and provided cross-functional engineering teams to build two core elements: payments and ticketing. Working in a highly complex and shifting technical environment, Loomery teams owned delivery across the complete product lifecycle from requirements definition through to deployment, delivering high quality solutions and enabling new functionality for Blue Light Card.
Brief
Blue Light Card was looking for a trusted partner to support their modernisation by owning development and accelerating progress in two key areas, together with co-ordinating delivery across the programme. The first area was payments, including Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Pay integration. The second was Blue Light Tickets (BLT) , a high-volume ballot system for discounted event tickets. Both areas lacked dedicated teams and were at risk of missing delivery deadlines. With limited pre-existing discovery and complex cross-team dependencies, there was no clear path to execution.
5+ Million
Users rely on BLC's platform
15,000
discounts from large national retailers to local businesses
100,000
Blue Light ticket ballot entries per week
Mapping out a successful path to modernisation
With limited pre-existing discovery into payments and ticketing, our priority was to define the scope, validate requirements, and align stakeholders. We ran an expedited domain discovery process, conducting over 20 stakeholder interviews, leading kick-off workshops and rapidly prototyping to identify key risks early. This process provided a comprehensive understanding of the challenges at play.
For the payments work, the challenge was to create a reusable payments component that could be adopted by several teams with different use cases across mobile, web clients and back office admin portals. For Blue Light Tickets, the challenge was to use a number of existing or in-development components to migrate the existing service onto BLC's new platform.
Building for quality in a complex environment
Given the complex and evolving technical landscape at BLC, we developed our solutions to be architecturally sound, scalable, and easily extendable. As our work touched multiple domains, we prioritised well-defined system boundaries and API contracts to reduce integration risk and enable future extensibility.
For example, while our brief did not include an Orders Service, we advocated building on one in the knowledge it would soon be required, saving time and effort in the mid-term. Similarly, we established a new authentication mechanism for service-to-service communication, ensuring payments could be consumed securely across BLC’s platform.
Delivering within an existing and incomplete system presented challenges, particularly around dependencies and deployment readiness. BLC's new Content Management System on which our work depended had not yet been deployed, blocking end-to-end testing. To work around this, we used mock data, targeted environment testing, and bespoke load testing scripts, ensuring our solution was robust despite external delays.
Ensuring rapid, predictable delivery
The Loomery team led and coordinated delivery across the entire programme, beyond the payments and ticketing areas we were developing. A priority was increasing visibility across workstreams, implementing data-driven delivery metrics, tracking cycle time and throughput to ensure work remained achievable within the given timeframes. We worked hard to enhance cross-team collaboration, proactively managing dependencies by maintaining open communication between teams. Introducing practical process improvements, we minimised disruption and ensured a smooth integration into BLC's technical estate.
On the payments and ticketing workstreams we maintained weekly reporting and real-time risk mitigation, ensuring stakeholders had full visibility of progress, blockers, and trade-offs. When unexpected challenges arose, we presented clear, well-informed options allowing BLC to make strategic decisions while we took responsibility for execution, keeping delivery on schedule throughout.
Conclusions
By combining strategic delivery leadership with hands-on execution, we enabled BLC to quickly modernise critical parts of their platform delivering Payments and Blue Light Tickets on schedule, while ensuring future scalability. Our approach not only resolved immediate technical and delivery challenges but also established a foundation for BLC to continue innovating independently, accelerating their growth as a PE-backed business.
‘‘I would describe working with the team at Loomery in one word: ‘smooth’. Our team is able to carry on and deliver the rest of the platform: we don't have to worry about key parts of it, we just know it's going to work.
As the CTO, it’s always good if you're not hearing about problems because it means that things are going well and potential issues are being raised up early enough to be taken care of.’
— Khalil Dimackie, CTO, Blue Light Card
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