Mendix World is an annual celebration of the work that the low-code make community is doing. Part of that celebration is the Customer Impact Awards, where we recognize some of the most transformative low-code work being done by Mendix customers.

Innovation can be defined in many ways, and the word carries different meanings depending on job role, industry, or even culture. For our customers, innovation can mean diverse IT-business collaboration, developing novel solutions in non-traditional ways, or bringing a truly unique proposition to market. For this award category, we are looking for customer submissions who push the frontier of the possible.

With that, we are pleased to announce the finalists in our Innovation award category. Read more about their work below, and don’t forget to register for Mendix World to find out the winners!

The Customer Impact Awards

In 2020 you showed us some of your best work – from helping citizens access critical financial aid to ensuring safer travel for passengers – and we want to celebrate how our customers’ businesses continue to evolve and grow. From team leaders to individual contributors, the Customer Impact Awards provide a chance to reflect on the great work you’ve been doing and show the rest of the world how you are making an impact with low-code.

The submissions were outstanding! From an organization that helps new arrivals (international students, ex-pats, migrants, and refugees) who don’t speak the local language receive public services, to a major manufacturer who has created an app that can work as an extract, transform, load (ETL) tool for data, our customers are redefining boundaries of what’s possible with low-code.

Without further ado…

Introducing the Customer Impact Awards 2021 Innovation Finalists!

Cirkl Provides New Opportunities to Home-Buyers in a Crowded Real-Estate Market

First on our list is Cirkl, an online real estate company based in the Netherlands. They have built a closed platform that connects sellers with buyers.

Most home buyers (who own a home) have the same plan: buy first and then sell. This decreases the available homes for sale as well as complicates the process of moving to a new home. Sellers may be waiting to purchase their next home before selling, causing a backlog of homes available for sale. Cirkl has found that just a fraction of the 600,000 home buyers will be able to purchase a home, as the well-known property portals only show 23,000 properties for sale.

Recognizing this opportunity, Jeroen Wilhelm, Managing Director and Co-founder at Cirkl, came up with a solution to this problem. Working with Wout Bakker, Product Owner at Succeszo BV, they built the Cirkl platform to help close this gap. Cirkl is an online platform of properties whose sellers are also looking to buy. To get access to the closed platform, buyers must also present their house for sale within the platform. By connecting buyer-sellers with other buyer-sellers, Cirkl is offering a new opportunity to those who have contingencies for selling, or even purchasing, property.

Collin Crowdfund Brings Entrepreneurs’ Ideas to Life with Crowdfunding

Next, we’re excited to introduce Collin Crowdfund, a crowdfunding financial service provider based in the Netherlands.

Securing funding has typically been associated with big banks and long processing times, proving to be a barrier to many small businesses. Loans have typically been given by a single lender, despite the idea of crowdfunding dating back at least to the 1990s. Now, that has changed.

Jeroen ter Huurne and Jan-Willem Onink, founders of Collin Crowdfund and veterans of the financial industry, wanted to make it easier for entrepreneurs to get access to funding. Using low-code, they worked with Appronto to build their platform from the ground up. The platform is a one-stop-shop application that can handle back-office processes of credit applications, manage all necessary banking transactions, connect to the appropriate auditing and approval authorities, and provides a high level of security and compliance for its users. While many of the major banks focus solely on metrics to determine creditworthiness, Collin Crowdfund also assesses the entrepreneur through a personal conversation. To date, more than €259 million has been invested, nearly 1,200 loans have been applied for, of which 99.5% have been successfully financed. This combination of accessibility and human interaction is providing more opportunity to entrepreneurs in the Netherlands

Washington Federal Bank Takes Development into Their Own Hands

Finally, Washington Federal Bank is a retail and commercial bank based out of Washington state in the US, operating more than 200 branches.

Dustin Hubbard, CTO at Washington Federal Bank, was tasked with making Washington Federal Bank digital-first. Hubbard initially turned to white-label solutions to replace their previous online banking solution. As he came to find out, these solutions were challenging to modify and integrate with. After 8 months of trying to retrofit the solution to Washington Federal Bank’s needs, the project was scrapped, and the team realized that they needed to move away from pre-built, cookie-cutter platforms and be in direct control of their client’s digital experiences.

Using low-code, Hubbard and his team rebuilt their online banking portal, including functionality to enroll in online banking, retrieve account and transaction details, internal and external bank transfers, and automatic bill pay. Their portal integrates with their extensive middle-tier API gateway, as well as their 3rd party identity access management. Customers get personalized experiences based on their identity and behaviors, whereas the white-label solutions that Hubbard evaluated did not provide this functionality.

Congratulations to the Customer Impact Awards 2021 Innovation Finalists!

Don’t forget to register for Mendix world using the link below to find out who will be crowned champion. We hope to see you there!

This blog post is part of a series. Be sure to check out the other Customer Impact Award finalists to see the incredible work our customers are doing: