U.S. bank speeds up time to market at 11% of traditional dev costs

Challenge

OutSystems versus skeptics

When the Head of Bank Development joined the bank in 2020, the company had already adopted OutSystems. However, the AI development platform wasn’t the most popular technology among developers.

“I inherited an IT team composed of Angular and C# developers that had the typical preconceived notions about OutSystems,” he described. “The platform had been forced upon them, and they didn’t want to use it.”

Things weren’t that different for the business. Without a style guide and little engagement from a requirement perspective, the OutSystems apps were seen as limited and inefficient.

But the Head of Bank Development didn’t share the same opinion. He managed a training program for technology graduates where they were trained in various technologies through rotation cycles, and noticed that the OutSystems track yielded the best results. “Developers trained in OutSystems looked at problems in a way we hadn’t before, pursuing experimental ideas and concepts,” he shared.

And that’s when the tables turned.

Solution

From process enhancement to customer-facing solutions

The Head of Bank Development focused on training to win over the developers. “I moved a few developers that were still skeptical about OutSystems to different teams and kept those that were genuinely interested in learning the platform,” he said. This approach was crucial to assembling the right team.

Once he had the developers buy-in, it was time to convince the business. After seeing the potential of OutSystems to improve clunky processes, he decided to tackle projects with a high technical debt that affected business operations. “We had several processes in on-premise Sharepoint and Nintex K2. So, we partnered with business stakeholders to understand what was missing in these processes and how we could improve them,” he shared.

With an average development time of two months and with only two developers, the digital bank was able to successfully modernize twelve business processes. “It was extremely fast and cost-effective, and it made the business realize the platform’s power,” he concluded. Today, the bank has fully sunsetted the K2 platform.

In four years, the bank has launched twenty-eight full apps and countless enhancements to existing ones. While the emphasis on continuous improvement of internal processes is ever-present, recently the focus has been on creating solutions to enhance the customer experience. Some of these include:

Results

Faster development at 11% of the cost

The new applications built in OutSystems have boosted operational efficiency and resulted in substantial cost savings. “With the wire transfer approval app, 90% of all wire transfers for consumer, single family, residential, and warehouse loans can be done automatically without human intervention,” the Head of Bank Development shared. Converting it to numbers, the app resulted in headcount avoidance of approximately thirty FTEs, saving $1.8 million in labor costs. But more importantly, it has reduced the risk of fraud.

Additionally, by retiring other workflow platforms, the bank is saving $150K annually while increasing business productivity and reducing errors.

From a development perspective, when compared to Angular development, the company has seen a 66% improvement in developer productivity with just 33% of the resources.

Pleased with these achievements, the digital bank is now pushing to expand OutSystems to other business areas. “We launched a program where we loan a developer from my team to a business unit to support them with an app they need. The senior developer guides and mentors the business unit until they have an MVP. At this point, we step back and let them run it,” the Head of Bank Development described.

As for the team, he plans to migrate more teams and technology into OutSystems over the next two years, including Angular and Xamarin. Furthermore, the company plans to leverage GenAI to migrate legacy technology to the OutSystems Developer Cloud. “We’re looking at really old technology like Basic, OpenVM, C# and migrate it to ODC. It’ll be a game changer for us,” he concluded.