Kensington Mortgages Transforms its Digital Properties and Streamlines Operations with Progress Sitefinity

Kensington Mortgages is a leading UK specialist mortgage provider whose products and services are sold exclusively through mortgage brokers and financial professionals. Historically and because of this positioning, Kensington’s customer-facing presence was very limited. To address this challenge, the firm embarked on a large, multi-phase program designed to present a modern, customer-facing, digital company, creating an attractive digital experience for their target audience. This evolution required real-time learning about who their website visitors were, building effective audience profiles and tailored journeys based on first-party anonymized data.

At the start of their digital modernization journey, Kensington not only lacked a direct customer-facing platform but also relied on a multitude of sites and portals for their existing customers and brokers. These sites often utilized different web content management systems and ran on different versions. Maintaining these sites, whilst ensuring their continued security and availability, had become a major burden for Kensington’s IT team.

Kensington sought to improve operational efficiency and streamline the release of new features. This also included updating their implementation and deployment processes, giving the lean Kensington IT team the ability to automate updates across all sites in a consistent and fully-audited manner. In addition, building an engaging and fully-integrated digital journey across different sites to improve the process of winning new customers was nearly impossible without a consistent view of their visitors. Thus, the organization wanted a solution that would allow them to easily gather actionable intelligence about anonymous site visitors and their specific needs and behaviors.

Kensington put its trust in Sitefinity partner Rika to upgrade and consolidate its digital properties onto a single Sitefinity instance, leveraging Sitefinity’s multi-site management capabilities. Rika also introduced Sitefinity Insight, a Customer Data Platform (CDP), to implement effective personalization on the customer sites, audience segmentation, journey analytics, and A/B testing. Sitefinity Insight would also serve as a bridge between the sites delivering end-user digital experience and the business analytics systems, capturing essential visitor and customer behavior patterns, while helping evaluate content performance and identify opportunities for optimization.

From an implementation architecture standpoint, Rika helped Kensington establish well-structured web environments. These included development, staging, UAT, production and DR, all based on Sitefinity’s scalable deployment model, separation of code and content, and support of DevOps and deployment pipelines.

Sitefinity SiteSync supported automated content updates across all environments, eliminating redundant work and providing a reliable process of review, approval and content publishing, including a full audit trail of content changes.

With the combined deployment of Sitefinity, SiteSync, Sitefinity Insight, and associated automation, Rika has streamlined both site development and infrastructure upgrades, and enabled Kensington to improve the customer journey while addressing strict financial services auditing requirements and regulation.

“Bringing everything into a multi-site instance and utilizing Sitefinity’s SiteSync capabilities has saved a lot of time and resources,” said Kristina Angelova, Partner & Digital Strategy Consultant, Rika. “Everything is in one place now and a full audit trail is available.”