Turn Legacy Banking Systems Into Fintech Solutions That Scale

Digital transformation presents a number of challenges for companies including:

• Incomplete legacy system integration
• Process efficiency bottlenecks
• Paper-based documentation risk

These challenges often eclipse the opportunity for innovation with traditional development technologies. Technology is disrupting everywhere. Incorporating low-code development breakthroughs cross-industry can help financial institutions find inroads to fintech solutions. The Mendix all-in-one platform can help them get there.

Healthcare enterprises such as ClaimSecure have built applications on Mendix that digitize processes that mirror the same challenges banks face daily. Insurance enterprises such as Zurich Insurance know how important accelerated application development is for modern customer service. Having a low-code application development platform in the IT tool chest means being available and ready to bring innovation to your customer base.

[See how the Mendix low-code application development platform can help your financial services enterprise achieve a dynamic roadmap. Watch Peter’s Mendix World session: (Analyst Perspective) Bring your digital banking roadmap to life with low-code.]

Forrester: Mendix Low-Code Facilitates Your Dynamic Roadmap

ATMs, mobile banking, and credit cards—the financial services industry has a history of bringing new products to market. However, Forrester Principal Analyst Peter Wannemacher argues that these innovations are primarily extensions or representations of the same product sets, marketing angles, and business models financial institutions have been providing since the mid-20th century. It’s time for a change.

Wannemacher says that banks must embrace dynamism to thrive during the era of digital transformation, fintech, and cross-industry disruption. The Mendix platform represents the dynamic approach to banking that is helping to propel financial services enterprises into the future.

“More than one in three US bank customers already agree with the statement, ‘all banks are the same,’ which is effectively the definition of a commodity,” — Forrester Principal Analyst, Peter Wannemacher

“According to Forrester’s research, more than one in three US bank customers already agree with the statement, ‘all banks are the same,’ which is effectively the definition of a commodity,” said Wannemacher. “Your bank’s ongoing relevance depends on its ability to differentiate in an increasingly crowded market and that in turns depends on how rapid and effective your changes, improvement, and innovation can be.”

Dynamism is the speed and the degree of change a bank can achieve. The question is not whether your bank is already iterating and pivoting, but rather are you putting in place the systems, processes, culture, and platforms that will enable your team to adjust when necessary and as needed into perpetuity. Wannemacher and Forrester see low-code application development as representative of a dynamic approach to digital roadmapping.

“Leading banks like ABN AMRO, Bendigo Bank out of Australia, Rabobank, Wells Fargo, and others, who are using low-code platforms that enable them to build stuff more rapidly than they ever could and more rapidly than their competitors,” said Wannemacher. “They can then explore, iterate, and measure the success of those capabilities.”

Innovation comes in many forms. It’s essential to embrace a multifaceted approach to innovation so that your team isn’t bogged down or dependent upon incrementally changing when they should be responding to a different digital disruption or product feature release. Sometimes, being able to incorporate adjacent industry innovation is the answer to your B2C application needs.

“As part of this, one thing that’s going to need to change is the type of roadmapping. Not a static roadmap that you decide upon on your tri-annual basis, but a roadmap that is constantly changing, a roadmap that is dynamic as your company, as your culture, is.”

[See a product demo of a ClaimSecure application built on the Mendix platform. Watch the Mendix World session: Automating and digitizing manual workflows with ClaimSecure]

From Manual to Mendix-Built

ClaimSecure is a Canadian healthcare claims management enterprise that processes more than 10 million health and dental benefit transactions worth $1.3 billion a year.

Before building a new case manager application on the Mendix platform, ClaimSecure relied on paper-based documentation and manual filing systems, decentralized client communications, and Excel or Access databases. It’s a story the Canadian healthcare claims management provider shares with many financial services enterprises, where antiquated processes are causing bottlenecks and security concerns as business scales.

“Once upon a time, employees at ClaimSecure were tied to fax machines, paper, and big filing cabinets,” said Linda Lin, Consulting Director, Drug Strategies and Innovations, ClaimSecure. “This was the way everyone worked in my department, my company, and my benefits industry. This is the way we all worked until TimeSeries and Mendix changed all of that.”

With Mendix, technology partner TimeSeries and ClaimSecure built a custom product they could put in front of their internal teams that improved their ability to provide better service for ClaimSecure customers. The applications TimeSeries and ClaimSecure built on the Mendix platform expedite invoicing and other process-based work requirements and increase access to helpful customer-service data for call center agents and caseworkers.

Customer service agents in healthcare and financial services share a similar pain point: neither can do their job the best they possibly could without access to the right data at the right time. Both enterprises in both industries know how hard they have to work to scale either up or out. Having decentralized sources of truth, paper records, and manual filing processes increase margins of error and slows down progress, and these problems only worsen as you grow.

“We were able to work with TimeSeries to import all our legacy data into the new Mendix application,” said Lin. “So when we produce reports we don’t have to go to two different places and two different databases.”

Building modern applications on the Mendix platform with the help of a trusted technology partner can help banks build solutions to integration, access, migration, and other essential digitization initiatives.

[See a product demo of a ClaimSecure application built on the Mendix platform. Watch the Mendix World session: Automating and digitizing manual workflows with ClaimSecure]

From Replacing Legacy to Realizing £700K in Savings

Financial services enterprises need to build replacement technology for antiquated technology that solves the problem for today and creates an opportunity for tomorrow. The same goes for insurance organizations. Many reasons were driving the decommission of Lotus Notes at the UK-based enterprise Zurich Insurance, including:

• Cost: On-premises hosting and maintenance were driving up costs
• Usability: Dated UI/UX with no multichannel support
• Technical debt: Out-of-date functionality, integration hurdles for new features and products
• Governance: Too many shadow IT solutions to work around Lotus Notes

Zurich Insurance considered many factors before picking a replacement solution, including workflow complexity, integration capabilities, and scaling both vertically and horizontally.

Security is also critical for businesses with sensitive customer information, such as insurance companies, banks, and other financial services enterprises. Mendix cloud can be deployed anywhere, securely, with the click of a button. For Zurich, it was a bonus to host sensitive data on the premises while deploying apps with fewer security concerns to the public cloud.

“Mendix has proven to be easier and faster to develop with when compared to traditional software development tools. It is easy to leverage reusable components and it allows us to reiterate throughout the product, working very closely with the business.”

Zurich Insurance employed the Mendix App Factory approach to development. The enterprise created several useful process-based applications with reusable components that stretched from branding and page templates to Okta security integration and custom-built reporting and auditing modules.

The result was faster development and better processes that in-house product owners are calling “a breath of fresh air,” “[an] efficient application fit for the 21st century,” and “easier to navigate and use.” Replacing Lotus Notes using the Mendix Low-Code application development platform was faster and required fewer resources when compared to traditional development methodologies, and saved Zurich Insurance an amazing £700,000.

Mendix is a Dynamic Solution to an Evolving Challenge

Business process management suites and robotic process automation solutions can help your financial service enterprise build resource efficiencies and accelerate times to market for your products and services. But for how long? The Mendix platform centralizes data and turns paper-based processes into lightning-fast efficiencies.

With Mendix, your data is secure and accessible to teams that have genuine customer impact. But best of all, the Mendix all-in-one Low-code platform allows your technology stack to evolve with innovations and disruptions and will help your business stand out in a crowded marketplace for years to come.