Great financial products and client services are the foundation of your enterprise, but non-traditional competition and evolving customer expectations have made digital transformation a top priority. Process automation is the first step to fintech, but it can be difficult and expensive to innovate on top of legacy systems and reams of paper trails.

With the Mendix low-code platform, financial institutions easily build solutions to process-based challenges and create new cost-saving efficiencies.

Learn how Mendix can help your financial organization eliminate shadow IT and Excel-based processes, reduce paper and human touchpoints, and extend application development to non-coders by incorporating citizen development capabilities. From city municipalities to financial service companies with global reach, makers use Data Hub, Workflow, and other Mendix platform tools to build future-proof, scalable solutions that modernize employee workflows and capture customers’ attention.

Scaling Citizen Developers

Shadow IT is so difficult because you don’t want to stifle your teammates’ drive and creativity. Your team is innovating solutions to their individual or departmental technology hurdles, and that’s great. Business users interface with clients and customers the most. They are the subject matter experts and the drivers behind strategic decisions at banks and financial institutions. They are also on the front line of internal process bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

The problem is when you lose control and scope of the one-off solutions. Unsanctioned technology is not just a process issue. It’s a security issue, too, especially in highly regulated industries.

“With Mendix you can be in control of your IT but still ride this new wave of business maker initiatives,” said Arjan Hendriksen, product manager at Mendix. “You can empower business makers using Mendix Studio and take advantage of insights and control through Mendix Control Center.”

With the Mendix platform, your team can bring IT and citizen developers from the business together with the visual, model-driven development framework of the Mendix Studio. IT controls user permissions with Control Center and has access to sophisticated tools they need to build everything from business process management solutions to robotic process automation using Mendix Studio Pro.

“Mendix Studio is our visual, easy to use, and yet powerful tool for business makers to build applications in a visual way, iterate, and get feedback to improve the application,” said Hendriksen. “Studio Pro is for the IT development team, where they can build rich and powerful applications in a low-code way.”

Together, the Mendix platform provides development opportunities for the entire spectrum of financial service team members from the customer expert to the engineer. Your team can build better products that turbocharge internal processes and create solutions for banking customers and business clients.

[Learn more about Mendix Studio and Mendix Studio Pro. Watch Arjan’s Mendix World 2021 Session: Enable business makers to solve business problems at scale.]

Overcome the Legacy Hurdle with Mendix Data Hub and Workflow

Legacy systems, multinational data management outposts, and strict regulations are only the beginning. Tech hurdles to digital transformation can be daunting for banks and financial institutions. However, the Mendix low-code application development platform helps enterprise businesses digitize from end-to-end with fewer resources.

With DataHub, part of the Mendix platform, a financial institution can build a workflow layer on top of their data that engenders IT and Business collaboration, allows for easy, safe integrations, and frees employees from time-intensive, process-based activities. It also means they won’t have to rely on shadow IT solutions or makeshift spreadsheet databases.

“By using Mendix Data Hub, we have a catalog where all the data within your organization can be exposed to any makers, but completely in control of the IT department,” said Abel Verweg, Mendix Product Marketing Manager. “So whether it’s a CRM, ERP or other applications, you can very quickly use them in your application logic.”

In combination with Data Hub, Mendix Workflow’s visual, model-driven design template makes it easy for the business to collaborate with IT at every step of the development process. The result is better-informed features that deploy quicker and capture ROI earlier.

“With Studio and Studio Pro, we have the Workflow editor, enabling you to visually model out the business process and this is where you can let this data out of your application landscape come to life,” said Verweg. “Whether that’s for a user task where somebody is prompted with information living somewhere else or a calculation that’s within the app for validation, for example, or, if you are moving toward intelligent automation, integrating your application with third-party services.”

When built on the Mendix low-code platform, the resultant application is available to meet bank and financial institution clients and employees wherever they are, in whatever format works best. With Mendix, your enterprise can build a Progressive Web Application, a native mobile application with offline capability. Mendix enables your team to create applications for any device from a desktop computer to a hand scanner.

[Watch Verweg and Mendix Product Manager Georg Maureder’s Mendix World 2021 session: Untangle the Excel Jungle: Solving the Process Problem with Data Hub and Workflow.

The Post-Paper Municipality

Wasted resources and inefficiencies are slowing down financial services enterprises, but the Mendix low-code application development platform can help. By digitizing paper and human-based processes and creating a centralized, user-friendly hub for access and execution, banks and financial institutions can reduce time-to-market while increasing security protocols.

Digital transformation is a daunting task, especially when security is a concern. The following Dubai Municipality (DM) initiative to eliminate paper-based forms demonstrates that even the most complex, regulated organizations, including financial institutions, can achieve impactful change with Mendix.

At the point the municipality of Dubai committed to going paperless by 2021, the city used more than 1,600 different paper-based forms internally and produced millions of sheets of paper waste per year. Manual processes forced bottlenecks, especially when coupled with no single system of record or poor user-experience issues such as non-responsive design and browser dependencies. Similar issues cripple productivity at banks and financial services enterprises every day.

The Dubai Municipality (DM) and RapidData Technologies created an electric correspondence system called Smart Office on the Mendix platform. Smart Office eliminated the need for paper-based forms and even integrated Alexa Voice to expedite services even more.

“Smart Office has enabled Dubai Municipality to go completely paperless via integrations like the digital signature integration, the PDF signature integration,” said John Socorro, Technical Lead DM. “We also have Workflow system, which has been built within the Smart Office system.”

DM and RapidData built Smart Office, an application on the Mendix low-code platform that enabled employees, citizens, and customers to work faster and smarter without paper. The Smart Office is native mobile and can be purchased in the iOS and Google Play stores. Currently, the DM application reaches 1.5 million users, including 6,000 concurrent users.

  • 80% of all DM digital services running on the Mendix platform
  • 50% reduction of time-to-market for service requests with Mendix
  • 1 Centralized data hub for all DM applications
  • 100% security compliance based on DM’s strict regulations and requirements

“Using Mendix, RapidData built a visually appealing and powerful internal and external portal, which meets all the international standards in website design and accessibility,” said Aysha Begum, Director, RapidData. “We are very proud to say after the revamp, Dubai Municipality now ranks number 1 with a score of 71% in GT metric score.”

[Learn more about Smart Office and moving from paper-based processes to a digital workflow. Watch Going Digital with Dubai Municipality: Paperless Processes at Scale]

What Will Your Enterprise Make with Mendix?

The Mendix low-code platform enables business makers to accelerate roadmaps and solve business problems at scale. Banks and financial institutions use Mendix to create better internal processes and build top-rated applications that exceed customer expectations. Mendix is helping enterprises connect legacy systems, retire inefficient processes, and digitally transform their business.