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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Key elements of our approach included:
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.
“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”.
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.
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.
With its renewed platform, Pennies can scale confidently, innovate faster, and continue amplifying the impact of micro‑donations across the UK and beyond.