ABN AMRO Delivers Future-Proof and Customer-Centric Banking Solutions at Scale
Banks face a challenging dichotomy to become more agile while remaining risk-averse in a digital-first world. In 2017 ABN AMRO – the third-largest bank in the Netherlands – set out to tackle this challenge by establishing a governed rapid application development capability.
“As a bank we try to keep a low risk profile, so our development has always focused on stable, secure, and reliable software,” said Mark Bus, Product Owner for Rapid Application Development at ABN AMRO.
“At the same time, we’re just like any other organization, and there is an overwhelming demand for automation and digital solutions.”
ABN AMRO selected the Mendix low-code platform to meet their rapid development needs, and by the end of 2022 had delivered over 60 applications. Over the last two years they have made tremendous leaps, scaling their portfolio to 150 applications with a roadmap to migrate over 250 sales and service forms into Mendix by the end of 2024.
Along their seven year low-code journey, ABN AMRO has continued to evolve their vision and execution with Mendix to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive and demanding industry.
Transformation Requires Evolution
ABN AMRO’s initial vision for Mendix was to serve as their mode 2 development mechanism – for exploratory, agile, and innovative projects – within a bimodal IT landscape.
“For us to quickly and rapidly develop something new or test a new product or feature – we were lagging there,” said Benjamin Blaauw, Head of Development Automation at ABN AMRO. “We also had a lot of shadow IT, and Mendix helped us to move from shadow IT to a managed IT environment.”
The key to any digital transformation is that it does not become static. Over time, ABN AMRO has continued to optimize their low-code operating model, from defining the right project fit to structuring a scalable team.
Bus reflects that some of their first Mendix projects – primarily rebuilding legacy systems – were not perfect successes. “I think we really started adding value when we began developing greenfield initiatives on Mendix. We could take an incremental approach, and each increment added value for our end users,” he said.
In one early case, a Client Assessment Sustainability application (CASY) was developed to guide relationship managers through a set of conditional questions to have conversations with customers about sustainability.
“This is one I am particularly proud of because it was the first that really delivered on the rapid application development promise,” said Bus. “It was delivered in just a few weeks from an idea to a first increment to production.”
Applications like CASY, along with a suite of financial crime detection tools and an internal employee recognition platform, demonstrated the value of Mendix across the organization, building support and awareness for their newfound capability.
If you look at the positioning of Mendix over the last seven years, it has really become a fully adopted software development platform supporting multiple use cases across multiple business lines.
Empowering a Growing Community
As the demand for new applications has grown within ABN AMRO, so has the volume of Mendix developers using the platform. The ABN AMRO team adapted their structure early on to ensure they were developing with quality and control.
“To maintain consistency and governance we switched from one central team that was responsible for building applications, to a central team that supports many teams. We adopted a federated governance model, where our central team is responsible for setting standards and guidelines,” said Bus.
Today, the community of Mendix developers in ABN AMRO is around 100 people spanning 25 different teams. “This ranges from groups that are developing with Mendix on a daily basis to teams that build maybe one or two applications. The diversity of teams building on Mendix has changed a lot, and we’ve adapted to support that,” said Bus.
To make these teams as efficient as possible, the central platform team will build and manage everything from databases to deployment pipelines so that the teams developing applications can stay focused on creating value.
“The power of a low-code platform like Mendix really lies in the collaboration between the developer and the business. I think ABN AMRO really understands that and focuses on that collaboration,” said Bart Zantingh, a Lead Mendix Engineer and member of the central low-code team.
Zantingh and the team foster collaboration in dedicated spaces across Yammer and Microsoft Teams, or during community meetups and hackathons. The goal is to get Mendix developers talking to and learning from one another, both for inspiration and to identify potential opportunities for reuse.
“For example, ABN AMRO tries to be an API-first organization, and the central platform team builds modules that connect to those different APIs, and we distribute those modules through the whole organization for teams to use and reuse,” he said.
“We encourage other teams to build their own reusable modules and then hand them over to us to maintain and distribute as well… Why reinvent the wheel if someone else has invented it already?”
A critical extension of the team is Mendix expert implementation partners. ABN AMRO has formed strategic partnerships with organizations like Capgemini and Stoneworx to fast-track specific projects and bring in outside low-code expertise.
“Collaborating with partner organizations like Stoneworx or Capgemini brings a lot of experience,” said Zantingh. “ABN AMRO uses Mendix in a pretty specific way, but that also means that sometimes we are in our own bubble.”
Those partners bring in outside perspectives. It helps us look at our Mendix implementation to see where we can improve and take inspiration from how other organizations are using the platform.
Software Supporting Business Strategies
ABN AMRO as an organization is aligned around three strategic pillars: customer experience, sustainability, and building a future-proof bank.
“If you look at how Mendix is supporting this, it’s mainly focusing on two of these pillars,” said Blaauw. “One is redefining the customer experience, where we use Mendix for our customer-facing sales and services forms. The second one is building a future-proof bank, where Mendix is a target technology to simplify our landscape and speed up development.”
The sales and services forms migration has been one of the largest Mendix projects within ABN AMRO to date. Across ABN AMRO’s website, there are hundreds of forms that customers or prospective customers can use to request information or services. These forms are responsible for supporting 2 million unique users every year.
“The forms migration project is such a large endeavor because it touches literally every department in the bank, from retail banking to corporate banking to wealth management,” said Zantingh.
The original platform supporting these forms was nearing end-of-life. The project kicked off in 2022, with 500 identified forms that needed to be migrated by the end of 2024.
“We have multiple technologies for building our applications and digitizing processes, one of which is Mendix,” said Blaauw.
If we see there is a short timeline and we need to deliver something quickly, then Mendix is the way forward.
ABN AMRO enlisted Stoneworx as their expert partner for this large undertaking. Stoneworx was able to provide additional highly trained Mendix professionals from their office in Portugal at competitive rates, working remotely with their local colleagues in a hybrid fashion, adding even more speed and quality to the project while maintaining cost control.
“We selected Stoneworx for three reasons. First, they are Dutch natives, this was important in terms of collaboration with our team and understanding of the forms. Second is that this migration is very complex, and we needed highly experienced developers, which they could provide,” said Blaauw.
“Lastly, we saw that the quality of the forms improved, as did the speed of delivery,” he added.
The forms migration project was carried out across three key phases:
- Consolidation: The team had to assess 500 forms with varying degrees of complexity. By assessing the utility of each form, the team ended up with a final list of 310 forms that needed to be rebuilt in Mendix.
- Composability: One of the key reasons for using Mendix was the ability to create reusable building blocks that were common across similar forms.
- Migration: The team began recreating those 310 forms in Mendix.
One of the lead developers on the forms project from Stoneworx is Frederique van der Ven. “At the beginning of the project we focused on creating reusable building blocks, because many of the forms are very similar. We had a lot of reusable components, and as we got into the form-specific migrations, we uncovered even more, so these parts of the process went hand-in-hand,” she said.
This approach is allowing ABN AMRO to achieve standardizing the experience across their customer-facing forms and accelerate the creation of new ones in the future.
One of the major benefits with how we set up the framework with Mendix is that we went into a composability mindset.
“We not only wanted to make the migration as easy as possible, but we wanted to make it really, really easy to build new forms in the future. I am very proud of what we’ve built so far, and that we’ve managed to make it so easy to use,” said Zantingh.
Banking Innovation at Scale
In reflecting on the last seven years with Mendix, the ABN AMRO team have identified some clear keys to their success.
- Find the right people for your low-code team, and structure that team in a sustainable way.
- Select partners who can provide highly skilled developers that your internal teams can learn from. And do not stop learning, as Mendix is constantly evolving.
- Understand that low-code development is still software development. While it moves more quickly, you still need to establish a good foundation within the platform and your team to create long-term value.
“One of the most important change management lessons that we learned – and are still learning – is that it takes time to convince people that low-code is just as good as any other development language,” said Blaauw. “You need to have people in your organization that are very enthusiastic about low-code and can advocate for the platform.”
There is no shortage of genuine enthusiasm across the ABN AMRO team. As someone early in her Mendix career, van der Ven says when she started investigating Mendix, she was “blown away by what could be done with low-code.”
Zantingh saw his first Mendix demo 15 years ago in Rotterdam and since then had “always wanted to become a Mendix developer.” Bus says that he is still having fun at work even after 25 years, and he considers Mendix one of his hobbies.
With ambitious goals in their future-proofing strategy, like digitizing 90% of their high-volume processes from end-to-end, the team is constantly looking for new ways to achieve this with low-code. In some areas, ABN AMRO is now able to experiment with emerging technologies like AI, with the reassurance that they are doing so in a controlled environment.
As part of their financial crime detection tools, several Mendix applications exist to streamline the workflows related to ‘know your customer’ (KYC) assessments, from case assignments to reporting. A recent test project proved successful in leveraging generative AI to create summaries of customer profiles based on existing data sources, then adding these profiles to the case files to accelerate the assessment process.
“Our vision for Mendix in our organization is to deliver a low-code platform in a low-ops way,” said Bus.
With Mendix we have the ability to deliver fast, but what I really like is that it’s more than just a low-code platform. It’s also an ecosystem – where Mendix, the partners, and the customers work together, all with the shared interest of thriving.