Isracard Accelerates Development and Process Efficiency with Mendix and RedHat

Isracard’s sales teams are the front lines of their customer interactions, however aging legacy systems were preventing them from processing customer requests as efficiently as possible. Isracard needed a means to deliver new software for their employees and customers at a speed that matched the pace of change in their industry.

In 2022 they adopted the Mendix low-code platform in tandem with the Red Hat OpenShift platform to rapidly develop new applications in a secure and reliable way from start to finish.

Overcoming the Legacy Lag

Isracard’s employees rely on a vast landscape of technology platforms, many of which can adequately meet their needs. However, some are aging and have become cumbersome for employees to carry out their daily work.

Isracard wanted the ability to extend or replace these systems – and needed to do so quickly. They ultimately determined that a low-code platform could be a useful complement to their development strategy.

Isracard evaluated two platforms – Mendix and OutSystems – deciding on the former for its:

• Availability of local partners and support who are either based in Israel or can speak Hebrew.
• Multi-cloud deployment options, as Isracard must deploy on-premises due to their industry and cybersecurity requirements.

“Mendix would work much more easily on-premises which is a requirement for us,” said Bakshi.

Isracard enlisted two development partners – Matrix IT and TOCnDix – in 2022 to conduct a proof of concept (POC). The goal for the POC was to showcase:

• The process of developing a basic workflow in Mendix.
• How the application would interact with an external database.
• That these foundational elements could be reused in future projects.

“We created the POC with a minimal workflow – just a few steps and some screens with fields and validation,” said Vered Lefkowitz, a software engineer at TOCnDix. “Isracard really wanted to understand the product, they didn’t just want a solution. Today they are very involved in the development and have more and more people developing in-house.”

Ensuring Speed, Performance, and Security

Developing new applications quickly was a top priority for Isracard – superseded only by the need to do so in a secure and governed way. Before developing their first application, Isracard worked with their partners to lay a foundation that would set them up for long-term success.

Joseph Horvath is a solution architect at Matrix IT who has been working with Isracard since their start with Mendix. “The projects in Isracard would require many integrations, sometimes with legacy systems, so it was very important to ensure we had the best possible performance,” said Horvath.

Isracard ensures optimal performance with Mendix by:

• Creating reusable API and REST protocols to integrate with Isracard’s many databases and legacy systems.
• Automating DevOps processes, such as the creation of new environments, to ensure consistency across projects.
• Deploying their Mendix applications alongside the RedHat OpenShift platform.

“At the infrastructure level we created Isracard templates in Mendix that we can use every time we start working on new applications,” said Bakshi. “We are creating reusable components and modules, and in some instances will also create a call between applications so that they remain connected.”

By creating a container-based IT infrastructure with RedHat OpenShift and developing with Mendix, Isracard is reducing the time for both development and provisioning while retaining greater oversight into their application performance. Given the requirements of their industry, the joint power of both platforms provides Isracard with security and consistency as they scale their portfolio of low-code applications.

“The OpenShift platform has the console and log possibilities that can connect to Kubernetes or Kafka for example, and we have a dashboard to easily see the performance and infrastructure details of the Mendix applications,” Horvath added.

Improving Sales and Customer Support

Isracard’s sales team members would typically carry out customer request processes in legacy Oracle Forms solutions. Their first Mendix project was to develop an application that would improve how Isracard’s sales team members processed customer’s loan requests.

The new application – SMART – was developed in just 8 months. The application can be opened from Isracard’s CRM system, automatically popping out a view with all the relevant customer details and a guided workflow.

Instead of asking customers for their information, SMART pulls up the customer’s name, email, phone number, and account information by way of an integration with the CRM system. The application takes the salesperson through a workflow that can run scenarios based on the customer’s risk or interest rates, and then guides them through a negotiation to get to an offer that the customer is happy with.

Alongside the customer and offer information, the application will display the proper verbiage and agreements for the salesperson to communicate without having to commit their scripts to memory.

Once the process is complete, the salesperson doesn’t have to worry about sending the follow-up email and documentation or recording the details back in the CRM – it is done automatically by SMART.

“We created the flow so that the sales team can process the requests more quickly, and it’s a very beautiful flow that doesn’t require you to have a ton of experience to use,” said Bakshi.

The new application is used by many salespeople and has successfully reduced:

• The time required to train new team members on how to execute the request process successfully.
• The number of systems or windows that a user would need to have open throughout the process to a single view, by way of the REST services from other systems.
• The time to process new loan requests.

“The original legacy system had some performance issues because of the business rules and logic. In Mendix we were able to create parallel and batch processes on the backend which improved the performance,” said Horvath.

IT wasn’t the only group pleased with the improvements within SMART.

“It was a nice feeling that they were excited about it, and they still believe in it. They saw that we could respond quickly to their requirements,” said Lefkowitz.

The basis of the SMART application was then taken and reused for a new iteration called SMART Biz. “The business requirement for SMART Biz is different, but it follows similar steps and has some common APIs. The data management interaction and UI is also the same. We started with the basis and then changed what we needed,” she said.

As a result, SMART Biz was developed in just 4 months – half the time of SMART. “We can create a demo or proof of concept very quickly with Mendix. The development time is quick, and the implementation and deployment are seamless,” said Horvath.

Closing the Business-IT Gap

A cornerstone of Isracard’s work with Mendix is a change in the way that business and IT collaborate throughout the software development lifecycle. The team worked in an Agile way – managing tasks in Jira, holding sprint reviews every week, and rolling out new fixes and features on a regular basis.

“It wasn’t like other projects in the past where they only saw the whole application once everything was finished,” he added.

Sales team members who would be using the system were involved in review cycles. “They felt part of the development decisions we were making,” said Bakshi.

Lefkowitz reflected on specific instances where user feedback was turned directly into a new feature. “There can be exceptions to the processes we’ve defined in the applications, so the users wanted the ability to record these,” she said.

“For instance, the typical process may show that a customer isn’t entitled to a certain type of card or loan, and then the next step would be to close the workflow. However, the users told us that they may want to introduce other product options instead. These were small adjustments that made the application much more usable.”

Empowering New Ways of Working

Today, Isracard has three Mendix applications live supporting their loan and credit card sales processes. They feel confident that Mendix is the right path forward to support on their mission to accelerate software development in a secure and stable way.

With such highly engaged business users, Bakshi and the team are focused on delivering updates and new feature requests in their existing applications while plotting a roadmap for what comes next. His goal is to start using Mendix for mobile applications and to expand to new departments such as human resources or operations.

The team is putting an emphasis on promoting the possibilities of Mendix both internally and externally. “Everyone hears the word Mendix in the organization, but not everyone is familiar with what it can do yet. We have some work to do there, but they see the results and they see happy customers, so in a lot of ways it speaks for itself,” said Bakshi.

Isracard is also eager to see the uptake of Mendix across Israel and hopes that there will soon be a burgeoning community of users to learn with.

For Bakshi and the team, the real value is seeing projects like SMART come to fruition and make a difference for Isracard’s employees on a daily basis. “Sometimes I will go to the sales rep floor and I look at their screens, and everyone is using Mendix, Mendix, Mendix. Many people are using our application – and I can see that there is a real impact in the work we are doing,” he concluded.