Mendix for Finance – How Low-Code Can Help with Digital Acceleration

As fintech companies continue to disrupt the financial industry, one of the enablers for financial institutions, allowing them to swiftly adapt to changing customer preferences and market dynamics, is Mendix's low-code development platform. In this article, we present how you can use Mendix to accelerate innovation in finance.

Mendix is a comprehensive, high-productivity Low-Code Application Platform (LCAP) that facilitates the entire lifecycle of creating, deploying, maintaining, and enhancing mobile and web applications at scale.

The platform makes it possible to accelerate development time by up to 7x, enabling users to deploy new solutions more quickly. As a cloud-native solution, it also offers the flexibility to deploy created applications easily, whether on-premises or on any cloud infrastructure of your choice. You can read more about Mendix’s characteristics in this article.

How is Mendix used for finance

Mendix can be used to build applications for banking, insurance, and financial institutions, including online banking platforms, insurance claims processing, and risk assessment tools.

By utilizing the platform, financial institutions can create comprehensive enterprise ecosystems through the principles of composability and reusability. What does this mean in practice? Users can leverage Mendix's digital marketplace, which offers pre-configured workflows, integrations with commonly used systems, and a diverse range of components that can be customized to meet various requirements, allowing users to implement tailored solutions.

There are a lot of possible use cases of Mendix low-code platform for financial services, but the most prominent ones are:

• institutional onboarding,
• creation of native banking applications,
• compliance complaints tracking,
• mortgage origination.

All of these use cases are supported by dedicated templates that facilitate workflow creation and customization. The templates can also serve as a starting point for initiating additional projects within the lending business units by leveraging shared functional components.

Why Mendix is a great choice for financial institutions

It's fast and flexible.

Mendix is praised for its ability to support fusion teams and multidisciplinary teams, enabling developers to build applications quickly. This aligns with the challenge of rapid development and deployment to keep up with increasing competition and limited funds.

It encourages experimentation and innovation.

The platform allows developers to try new approaches and features, and this emphasis on continuous experimentation and finding new ways to speed up development addresses the challenge of staying innovative.

It caters to a broad spectrum of developers.

Mendix serves a wide range of developers, from citizen developers to professional hard-code developers. This inclusivity addresses the challenge of accommodating different skill sets within an organization.

It's easy to integrate.

As we know, integration is a critical challenge for many enterprises, and Mendix is positioned as the glue between different applications. The platform offers various integration options, including connectors into systems like SAP, addressing the challenge of connecting diverse ecosystems.

It has a lot of features.

From Mendix Studio and Mendix Studio Pro, which jumpstart the process of software development, to Mendix Assist, which acts as a second pair of eyes for developers, and Mendix Data Hub, enabling the connection and management of data from various sources - the comprehensiveness of Mendix's features makes it an all-in-one tool for software development.

It leverages AI to be even more innovative and fast

Mendix integrates AI capabilities into its platform, enhancing the development lifecycle. This integration of AI capabilities not only enhances the development lifecycle by accelerating the IDE, but also empowers organizations to create intelligent, data-driven applications that can adapt to evolving customer needs and market dynamics.

Examples of financial companies using Mendix

Rabobank IDB

Rabobank IDC, a leading international cooperative bank headquartered in the Netherlands, has chosen to prioritize a digital-first approach to meet the evolving expectations of digitally native customers.

The project had several key goals:

• Reduce customer onboarding abandonment.
• Deliver an omnichannel experience.
• Provide value to two separate international markets.
• Govern and maintain the apps with limited resources.

The institution selected Mendix to create a comprehensive, cross-channel environment encompassing both web and mobile applications.

"We decided to use Mendix in all areas where speed and agility are essential. We initially focused on three customer-facing areas: the mobile app, the client onboarding process, and the entire online banking platform," said Paul Kammerer, Head of Business Development & Strategy, as quoted by Mendix.

To meet elevated customer expectations, address increased competition, reduce customer onboarding abandonment, and tackle compliance challenges, the bank developed a customer-facing savings portal for the German and Belgian markets.

"We have three significant channels, all of which are strategically important and built on Mendix," Mendix quotes Kammerer.

The Mendix banking app for Rabobank was designed for use in two separate markets and was managed by a small business division with limited resources. The product is now being used by over 500,000 customers, achieving high ratings of 4.7 on both iOS and Android app stores.

ABN AMRO

As the third largest bank in the Netherlands, ABN AMRO operates in Belgium, France, Germany and the UK offering private, retail, commercial, and institutional banking services.

Just like in the case of Rabobank, changing customer needs were one of the factors that forced ABN AMRO to digitally accelerate and deliver new innovative solutions for its clients.

The idea was to utilize the Bimodal-IT concept promoted by Gartner. While the Mode1 has been covered by existing Microsoft and IBM solutions, the Mode 2 – related to solving new problems and experimenting with reduced delivery time – gave the space to implement the Mendix.

“The second mode was where we didn’t have an explicit strategy yet, which was leading to this huge portfolio of shadow IT applications. We decided to expedite our search, and it quickly became clear that low-code was the answer we were looking for. ” Mark Bus, the Product Owner, Rapid Application Development told Mendix.

The company was looking for new ways to digitize its touchpoints with over 3 million customers and 19,000 employees. They utilized the Mendix low-code development platform to create more than 60 low-code applications that facilitate internal process automation.

“We are also an organization which, like every enterprise, needs a capability to deliver software fast.” – adds Bus.

The use of Mendix enabled ABN AMRO's IT team to meet the increased demand for digital solutions by reducing development resources by 20% to 40%.

ING

ING's Document & Content Services department leveraged Mendix to create an app serving the outbound process and communication with customers in the Netherlands.

The goals were to:

• Increase the autonomy of self-organizing teams in creating new solutions to improve the customer journey.
• Build an environment that enables employees to create new digital solutions within specific user journeys independently.
• Enable employees to create processes and pursue transactional communication without the need for additional IT resources.
• Maintain the "first-time right" approach that ING fosters.
• Build and launch a product that would be fully tested, regulation-compliant, and security-compliant.

After evaluating various automated testing tools, ING decided to create the application using Mendix and enlisted the help of one of Mendix's partners. They introduced a cloud-based Mendix Application Test Suite designed to be used by non-IT staff.

The ATS was custom-built exclusively for the Mendix platform, constructed on the foundation of Selenium, the standard tool used at ING.

One of the crucial requirements was for the Mendix team and their testers to create easily reusable test scripts that could be employed across various app environments.

"By using ATS, we would increase the immediate adoption of the app by the business." Ed Spitteler, Expertise Lead Outbound Communication at ING quoted by Mendix.

After creating user story acceptance criteria that included a test automation requirement, ING has conducted over 2,200 automated tests. The team is capable of resolving potential issues on their own, without the need for a dedicated IT team.

The use of Mendix ATS has enhanced the feedback loop within the ING team, resulting in faster development and a shorter time-to-market.

As Ed Spitteler, Expertise Lead Outbound Communication, ING told Mendix:

“We can say that the app is not just running, it is functionally working. We do this by automatically running a series of test scripts every four hours.”

Conclusion

As traditional financial institutions face increasing pressure to adapt to the evolving demands of digitally-savvy customers and fierce competition from fintech disruptors, Mendix emerges as a powerful ally for financial organizations seeking to stay ahead of the curve.

The platform's flexibility enables financial institutions to deploy applications in various environments, whether on-premises or in the cloud, ensuring adaptability to changing technology landscapes.

Thanks to its comprehensiveness and high productivity, financial institutions can not only accelerate the development of new products and services by up to 7 times but also maintain and enhance them with ease, even if they are customized enterprise solutions.

Real-world examples of financial institutions, such as Rabobank, ABN AMRO, and ING, successfully implementing Mendix, showcase its practical benefits. If you would like to leverage Mendix to meet evolving customer expectations, enhance internal processes, and achieve remarkable results in terms of customer satisfaction and resource optimization in your company, our team of Mendix developers is here to assist you.