From One Solution to a Financial Services Ecosystem

Welcome to the product development team at National Charter Bank (a very hypothetical bank). Your first order of business? Digital transformation.

Don’t run away! Yes, digital transformation is a huge, daunting task for every institution. But you’ve got a bit of a secret weapon: the Mendix enterprise app development platform.

Laying the foundation with Compliance Complaint Tracker

National Charter has recently deployed the Compliance Complaint Tracker from Mendix. This end-to-end complaint handling system eases the burden of regulatory requirements by allowing orgs to log, track, resolve, and keep all records of customer complaints. Audits are never fun, but the Compliance Complaint Tracker means you’re much better prepared.

Compliance Complaint Tracker helped the bank:

• Replace and centralize a chaotic email and spreadsheet process
• Realize immediate ROI by reducing the time burden on stakeholders
• Increase the quality of user experience. This can and likely will also help employee satisfaction because they’re better equipped.
• Be able to better respond to government audits
• Get on the same page—no worrying about disparate systems or processes.

The bank is thrilled with that release, but you have a mountain of roadmap items and a lack of resources.

Fortunately, with Mendix low-code, you have a platform that can increase the velocity of application development across your enterprise way past that initial single-point solution.

Build the case with Mendix

For National Charter (like most banks), the top 10% of commercial bank customers generate 90% of our revenue. Those customers are critical to the bank’s success.

Currently, escalations from those customers are getting tracked across multiple email threads with different stakeholders and varying amounts of overlap. That makes keeping track of anything a nightmare. Getting a better VIP escalation system in place is a must.

At its’ core, the Mendix Compliance Complaint Tracker is an escalation tracker, so the main workflow could be beneficial with the use case of our VIP escalations. It also solves many of the same pain points, like replacing email, reducing time burden, and better UX. Through that lens, our desired outcomes are a match. Those workflows and processes can be used across the enterprise with just slight modifications.

On the technical end, we can take the same escalation IDs, descriptions, and links from our compliance complaint tracker and port those over directly, so all we have to do is add in a stakeholder member list (making sure the right colleagues are getting the right messages), and a Root Cause/Lessons Learned section. Mendix has a visual editor that makes it easy.

Because so much of our potential solution is already built, we can work with business stakeholders and empower citizen development instead of overburdening our IT resources. Now we’re getting things done faster, getting out to the market, and taking market share.

Reusability=results

By taking the bones of our Compliance Complaint Tracker, we built and deployed our commercial and business customer VIP escalations tracker quickly.

Because we could use our existing IDs, descriptions, and links, those were taken care of, meaning that the team could focus on those elements that weren’t in the Compliance Complaint Tracker, like adding approval layers, watchers, and root cause and preventative actions.

Using and modifying existing components meant that our build took a fraction of the time and resources it would have otherwise. As we build our ecosystem further, we’ll continue growing our library of available components. It truly makes development simple.

Reusing components also means compounding our time gains and getting more and more done at speeds we wouldn’t have thought possible.

Further, we’ve empowered our business teams to identify problems and develop their own solutions, opening up our pipeline even further.

Maybe best of all is that we’re breaking down silos throughout the business. The escalation solution could work between the commercial and consumer sides of the organization, so we’re developing solutions that can apply to different business units.

Data: A stone rolling downhill

Let’s continue down this road. Our new escalation tracker has also given us access to tons of new data. And what can we do with that?

1. Because everything is centralized, we can perform more proactive analysis.
2. Management has visibility into individual escalations as needed and more information about the aggregate.
3. We can better highlight deficiencies in our technology. Is there a particular system that’s failing our customers? What are the trends?
4. Results should decrease the trend in VIP escalation as the new app embeds preventative measures for recurrence and preemptive reporting that identifies potential future escalations.

We can also take that data to, you guessed it, solve more problems. Combine your components, your skills, and your data to create more and better solutions. Mendix calls it the App Factory, but think of it as a change to your fundamental mindset. Once you’re thinking in this way, you just can’t stop. The ideas and deployments keep coming.

<Washington Federal used Mendix to build out a brand-new online portal. Now, they’re using citizen development to add new features and provide a best-in-class customer experience.>

Prepping for development hyperspeed

To get yourself started, break your Mendix builds down. What things are they accomplishing for the business? What are the pieces? Where can they apply next? That’s how you build the mindset. Here’s a template to get you started. We call it the Composability Checklist. It’s old-school, but it’s effective. The connections are there for you to discover.

^{Figure: Composability Checklist for National Charter’s planned VIP Escalation Tracker.}

In Part 3 of our series, we’ll dive deeper into the technical end to look at how Mendix supports financial institutions and answer some of the more common questions around builds, integrations, and deployments.

If traditional development is the Model T, your first Mendix build is building the sports car. And your further iteration and development gets your enterprise to F1-level. The more you make, the more your possibilities expand.