Hastings Direct
Increase pricing change throughput without increasing delivery risk
How we helped move pricing change from one or two releases a week to several changes a day per product by improving integration confidence and removing a major delivery bottleneck.
At Hastings Direct, the headline result was simple enough for anyone in the business to understand: we helped move the platform from supporting one or two price changes a week to supporting several changes a day for each product.
That was not a cosmetic improvement. It removed a serious bottleneck in the way the platform could respond to commercial needs.
The bottleneck behind the scenes
Pricing platforms do not just need correct calculations. They need confidence.
When pricing rules, customer journeys, third-party integrations, and supporting systems are all tied together, even small changes can become slow because every release feels risky. The issue is not always that teams cannot make the change. It is that proving the change is safe takes too much time and too much effort.
That was the real drag here.
What we changed
We focused on the part of the system that was acting as a release brake.
By improving integration testing, pricing validation, and the tooling around the private car insurance journey, we helped create a much tighter feedback loop around pricing change. Teams could see earlier whether a change behaved correctly, validate pricing outcomes with more confidence, and stop relying on the kind of manual effort that quietly limits release frequency.
This was engineering work with a direct commercial effect. Better technical assurance meant the business could make pricing changes faster, more often, and with far less friction.
Why that mattered commercially
In insurance, pricing is not background plumbing. It is one of the most commercially sensitive areas of the platform.
If every meaningful change has to queue up behind a slow validation process, the business pays for it in missed agility. If changes can move several times a day instead of once or twice a week, the effect is immediate.
The release process stops being the limiting factor.
What stayed with the client
The real win was not a test pack sitting in a repository. It was a better operating rhythm.
We left behind:
- stronger automated confidence around pricing changes
- a more reusable testing approach for future enhancements
- better visibility across integration-heavy customer journeys
- a delivery model that let product teams move at the pace the business needed
Why this story matters
This is a good example of the kind of problem we enjoy solving.
On the surface it can look like a testing problem. In reality it is a platform throughput problem. Fixing it means understanding how architecture, integration, quality engineering, and commercial responsiveness all connect.
That is exactly where Port60 adds value.