Redefining The Digital Financial Services Ecosystem

Financial institutions are often in the tough spot of using lots of bespoke solutions for many singular problems. There are countless stories of ambitious build projects coming in years and millions of dollars behind plan (if they come through at all). So, you buy because you have to get something done fast. Having led digital products for a regional bank in the United States, I know from experience that the traditional buy-versus-build choices are rife with delivery risk, uncertainty, and external dependencies.

But you’re not getting ahead when you buy what everyone else is buying. In fact, you’re opening yourself up to long-term risk by trying to balance dozens of disparate systems that don’t link together and bog down your customer experience. Your technical debt keeps increasing and your customer offering gets more fragmented.

Mendix is a modern application development platform driving digital transformation and differentiation for financial services organizations. Enterprises around the world are using the Mendix platform to

• Tie siloed systems together
• Create winning user experiences
• Get to market faster without increasing technical debt

Those advantages aren’t available without engaging with a modern application development platform. If you’re already using Mendix or have considered it, you already know all that. That’s table stakes. If Mendix low-code is new to you, here’s a quick primer.

So, let’s say you’ve built out your first Mendix solution, and your users love it (I might be biased but 97% of low-code users can’t be wrong). Great! But that’s just the beginning. Financial institutions can start with a single solution and grow into an entire digital ecosystem. Mendix empowers organizations to consider the possible and make it reality. Let’s go on the digital transformation journey together.

Choosing a different digital transformation path

The Mendix platform helps you regain control of and accelerate your roadmap with solution templates. From native mobile apps to loan origination to customer onboarding, these templates are built specifically for financial services. They’re easily customizable, fast to deploy, and, just as importantly, fit with your core systems. It’s a fast way to get a unique solution to the market. If you’ve considered or are using Mendix, you certainly can’t be blamed for looking at those templates as a single-point solution. That’s been the traditional approach in the industry, but that approach is the enemy of innovation.

You might not realize it, but that first Mendix solution is your key in the door of digital transformation. In an era where customers demand better solutions and nontraditional competitors are more than happy to provide them, you can’t afford not to open that door. You might have chosen Mendix for short-term results, but now you have the tools for long-term growth.

<Read more: Check out the Digital Execution Manual>

Optimization vs. transformation

A recent Gartner report looked at the dilemma of process optimization vs. digital transformation. Consider where your organization sits on that spectrum. If you’re buying off-the-shelf solutions, you’re firmly in the “optimization” camp. And that’s okay! Most organizations are.

Now, take a step back and look at your organization’s roadmap. Chances are that your short-term roadmap is filled with maintenance tasks and your 3- to 5-year plans are filled with more innovative ideas. But, as fires pop up, regulations change and things break, those multi-year plans shift more and more to the short-term fixes. You fill the gaps because every new project that starts from scratch is a massive investment in infrastructure and resources, and that’s not feasible for most orgs.

Fortunately, your first Mendix project opens up a different path.

A development jump starter

One of the major features of the Mendix platform is reusability. Once you’ve set up an element on the platform in a project, you can pick that element up and use it elsewhere.

Take your branding, styling, terminology, and connectors from one project to the next. Utilize the Mendix platform’s visual editor to connect the business and IT. Enable the business to prototype before handing it off to IT. Reduce development cycles, maximize resources, and deploy faster.

What used to take 12 weeks can now be done in 4, because the Mendix lifecycle encourages efficiency through reuse. You have the potential to completely rework your whole roadmap to get ahead of your competition and delight your customers.

Within their first six weeks using Mendix, Washington Federal accomplished more than they had in the previous eight months with a previous vendor.

Imagine what you could do by taking a solution and repurposing a large portion of it to solve another problem. That’s making the most of the Mendix platform by maximizing your resources to solve problems without starting from square one every single time.

From theoretical to a tangible digital ecosystem

In this series, we’ll take a journey together, moving from a single-point solution as a starter and a proof of concept to making a business case and multi-year roadmap for expansion.

We’ll meet the very fictional company National Charter Bank and walk through the situations and questions that they’re facing that might look very similar to ones facing your own organization.

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll look at taking our initial single-point solution and reusing components to build out and expand. In Part 3, we’ll look at the technical end in a little more depth and tackle some common questions in the financial services space.

Plugging holes with single-point solutions can’t be considered successful anymore. You’re not differentiating from your competitors, and you’re not keeping up with technology. Mendix low-code enables you to build on initial successes and regain control of your digital roadmap. Imagine the possibility of being able to act ambitiously instead of reacting. You can focus on today and the future at the same time. Come back for Part 2, and we’ll show you how.