Software company Savana provides core agnostic, omnichannel digital delivery solutions to drive operational efficiency and customer engagement. To accelerate the launch of a new product planned to transform the servicing experience for thousands of banking users, Savana transformed its UX development approach.
By using OutSystems, Savana got to market faster with a new servicing UX for its Digital Delivery Platform. Bank employees now have a unified UX that improves their efficiency, helping them deliver superior omnichannel banking experiences to customers.
“Using OutSystems has dramatically accelerated our time to market. For example, to support the Payroll Protection Program, we launched a completely new loan servicing experience in less than five weeks. That kind of speed is unheard of in our market.”
Savana is a leading financial technology provider with a team that has delivered software solutions for decades at some of the world’s largest US banks and financial institutions.
Since 2009, Savana has transformed bank operations by encapsulating legacy systems in an API-centric digital delivery layer to drive workflow automation, process orchestration, and seamless integration across core banking platforms and connected systems. This approach enabled Savana’s clients to quickly modernize operations, increase customer engagement, and provide more value at every stage of the customer lifecycle across all channels.
In 2016, the company recognized that open banking standards presented a new opportunity. Savana decided to extend its value proposition to financial institutions with a new omnichannel customer and account servicing UX to serve customers with greater efficiency and consistency. Providing a unified digital experience for branch, back-office, and contact center teams would be a welcome game-changer for most financial services firms.
"The typical user experience for back-office workers is a mish-mash of disparate customer service solutions. We replace those with a unified experience like a single pane of glass in front of multiple back-end systems."
Savana’s proven model of encapsulating legacy systems in an API-powered digital delivery platform gave the company a head-start to seize this opportunity. However, the breadth of functionality it needed to develop meant that years of front-end development stood between a bold vision and getting the product into customers’ hands.
“We needed a development approach that would help us get to market much faster,” explains Mike Wolfel, President and CTO at Savana. “Moreover, we knew that an iterative development approach was essential. UX would be one of our top competitive differentiators, so rapid refinement based on user feedback was essential.”
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No lock-in, open standards-based platform
Deliver customer-facing appsSavana’s development team researched low-code application development platforms to speed up front-end development. In addition to strong capabilities for integration and the creation of brilliant user experiences, Savana’s evaluation criteria included:
Savana identified five platforms that merited investigation but dismissed several of these quickly.
"As an ISV, independence is massively important to us. So, avoiding lock-in was an overriding concern. We chose OutSystems as it generates standards-based non-proprietary code, giving us full control of hosting secure digital solutions for banks and financial services firms."
Savana became an OutSystems customer in late 2016. Over the next two years, the company ramped up its development team and extensively tested the market.
“Our new product was in stealth mode for a couple of years,” explains Mike. “The product goal was to unify everything banks require for branch, back-office, and contact center operations. Given the breadth of UX development required, we recognized that a traditional approach was simply not going to take us there fast enough."
During the development phase, rapid iteration was crucial, as the development team and product managers tested the user experience with early adopters.
“In the past, we released around 25 features every five weeks. Since adopting OutSystems, we’ve been working in two-week sprints delivering around 30 features at a time,” says Mike. “The thesis was that a low-code approach would enable extreme velocity, and we’ve proven that time and again.”
During the build phase, Savana grew its development team, and now around half of its developers are trained on OutSystems, with around 40 percent of developers using OutSystems daily. Inducting new developers and integrating them into the development team has proven quick and cost-effective.
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Learn more about becoming an ISV“We find the OutSystems self-paced learning materials very effective,” says Mike. “We use different learning paths depending on the developer’s focus area—for example, integration of back-end services or front-end development. New developers join a scrum team after one or two weeks of training. Then we gradually introduce them to bigger and more complex development tasks over a few months.”
“In the two years since launch, we’ve seen incredible traction in our market. We are already in production at several US banks and expecting to have at least 20 banks using the solution by the end of 2022.”
Savana’s Digital Delivery SaaS product launched in late 2019, providing a single solution across all channels and products to drive efficiency and help banks improve their customer experience.
“In the two years since launch, we’ve seen incredible traction in our market,” says Mike. “We are already in production at several US banks and expecting to have at least 20 banks using the solution by the end of 2022.”
Savana attributes its success to several factors, including:
"Rapid configuration gives us a competitive edge—it helps us during the sales process, speeds time to value, and lowers implementation costs."
Savana’s speed and agility advantage partly comes from the speed with which it can deliver new UI features with OutSystems. But it also comes from having a software architecture that avoids technical debt when making customer-specific configurations.
Results that Savana attributes to its use of OutSystems include:
“Using OutSystems has dramatically accelerated our time to market,” says Mike. “For example, when the COVID crisis blew up, we needed to help our clients support the Payroll Protection Program. We launched a completely new PPP Loan Servicing experience in less than five weeks. That kind of speed is unheard of in our market. Since then, we’ve rolled this into the main product as a loan servicing module.”
Looking ahead, Savana expects accelerated uptake from regional US banks and credit unions. Its rapid innovation with OutSystems continues. Plans for the future include new front office solutions for bank tellers and branch automation and a low-code development framework to enable customers to extend their Savana implementations to online consumer banking and mobile channels.
