Major Financial Services Company Solves Scalability Challenges with Low-Code Development

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• 8 core IT staff
• 4 months
• 50% more functionality
• 6x faster development speed

Taming Government Processes Jumpstarts Company Growth

Challenge – A major Silicon Valley-based financial company has been a leader in 1031 exchanges, EB-5, and fund administration since its founding in 2005. Theirs is a complex business and one that customers rely on to remain compliant with U.S. tax and immigration law.

The Customer Company is a pioneer in its field, initially helping to create processes and transparency where little existed. As its investor-heavy customer base grew from hundreds to thousands, the company faced challenges scaling its manual activities around documentation and administration.

Facing a long-term scenario that consistently increased headcount primarily due to manual processes, thereby driving up the costs of its services, the Customer Company turned to technology to help solve its scalability woes.

Before the Low-Code Company, the Customer Company’s original technology stack was based on Microsoft’s .NET framework and included:

• UI based on ASP.NET and jQuery
• Business layer built using C# & CSLA       
• Back-end database services built on Microsoft SQL Server

But as the company continued its uncharted growth, and as the demand on IT for more robust systems to accommodate the need for more and better data increased, the existing systems’ limitations became more pronounced.

“We had a lot of challenges to address when we started looking for alternatives to how we were maintaining our existing systems and addressing the needs of our customers moving forward,“ said CTO, John Doe. “We had pockets of systems that worked well for us that we didn’t want to get rid of, so integration was critical. We have a solid team of developers with a deep background in C# and ASP.NET, but we were spending far too much time on tedium. I needed to standardize on a platform that would help us all generate multipliers of efficiency and produce quality code that was predictable and repeatable.”

For the CTO, it wasn’t a matter of “If” he should consider replatforming, rather when and how.

Previous Challenges Inform Decision to Replatform with Low-Code

Solution – For the Customer Company’s small IT team, constant change requirements due to customer requests for new functionality, and regulatory process updates that required time-consuming coding and testing, meant more time spent on upkeep of the existing technology stack and less time spent on innovation. Frequent supplemental use of external developers to help manage the backlog also meant inconsistent code and efficiency losses from repetitive hand-coding.

Priorities:

• Consolidate data models into a single, cohesive structure
• Reorganize business logic into highly reusable, shared functional models
• Continue to maintain separate internal and external-facing apps
• Use workflow automation to promote consistency and reduce errors

Before discovering the Low-Code Vendor, the CTO and his team, using another vendor’s solution, spent more than a year developing a new platform from an existing CRM using Java and running on MySQL.

“The results were disappointing,” said the CTO. “Functionally, and from a performance standpoint, it just didn’t meet our expectations, and it disrupted the entire development organization.”

Recognizing that another pivot so quickly could jeopardize upcoming milestones, the CTO’s team returned to business-as-usual and managed to deliver a new version of their core platform. But, previous problems remained. Armed with additional insight into available technology options, and vowing not to make the same mistake twice, he launched an exhaustive search for a new solution.

The CTO said, “I had some very specific ‘must haves,’ which included a solution that rendered compiled code, not just runtime code. Runtime code is an issue for auditors because it is very difficult to prove to them that the code you are running in your live environment is the code that you built.”

After six months of evaluating ten vendor solutions, in the end, the Low-Code Vendor checked all the boxes:

• Consolidate data models into a single, cohesive structure.
• No vendor lock-in.
• Ability to reorganize business logic into highly reusable, shared functional models.
• Securely maintain separate internal and external apps.
• Workflow automation that promotes consistency and reduces errors.

Investing in the Low-Code Vendor Yields Positive Returns in Just Four Months

Results – Starting with a trial license of the Low-Code Vendor’s platform, the CTO and his team got up-to-speed with visual development using OutSystems online training courses, and received a little help on-site from a Low-Code Vendor engineer.

Their initial trial proved that low-code could deliver the scalability the company needed on the development side and within a few short months, it was clear the Low-Code Vendor could help solve the team’s other woes involving the backlog.

Since implementing the Low-Code Vendor, the Customer Company has delivered on its initial back-office scope of work and more, adding 50 percent more functionality to their platform and replacing several legacy spreadsheets with a new solution that simplifies data entry on the front-end, and significantly improved back-end tracking and reporting processes. And all in just four short months.

Today, this international financial company runs a genuinely agile, rapid-application development team with two-week sprints and new software releases bi-weekly. With the Low-Code Vendor, they have been able to:

• Rework back-end architecture to improve scalability.
• Improve their overall enterprise agility.
• Redesign their Development > Quality Assurance > User Acceptance Testing processes. to take advantage of faster, iterative updates.
• Streamline the requirements definition process to better articulate business needs.
• Leverage workflow automation to enforce consistency and reduce errors.

“Moving development to the Low-Code Vendor has been a great decision for us. We have eliminated the IT backlog that was preventing us from delivering the kinds of innovative solutions that help us stand out as a provider of custom financial services solutions.”