Low-Code improved the UX of the mobile banking

The financial services companies know that their customers expect their banks to the same digital experiences they receive from Google, Apple, Instagram, and Amazon. The disruptors Fintech have the business model to accumulate assets in a great UX, and is now competing in the same space that the financial services companies-traditional.

The new competition is not the only consideration. With new regulations and restrictions and new patterns of purchase, customers in the age of COVID-19 require an efficient development and time-to-market speed.

The platform code under Mendix allows his team to face the competition and to meet the changing demands. The platform Mendix makes it easy to create from a base of code, reuse of components and the implementation in the cloud with a single click. In addition, the platform Mendix is safe, collaborative, and scalable to meet the needs of their clients in banking.

Multi-channel banking with Mendix

Albaraka Bank South Africa had big ambitions for digital: the financial institution pioneering knew that I had to create a best digital offerings to their customers, despite being small in size and budget.

“Six months ago, we were a traditional organisation, aged and rigid,” said Mohammad Kaka, director of operations of Albaraka Bank South Africa. “Today, we have moved from face-to-face to the cloud, face-to-face and web limited to multi-channel”.

Albaraka had offers digital minimum for their clients. They had a web site just for the desktop which required an incorporation-dependent branch. The user interface was outdated, isolated and administered by the provider. After you demonstrate and test various solutions, support, scalability, security, and capabilities, easy integration of the platform Mendix convinced the team of Albaraka.

“The code under Mendix has allowed us to create compelling user experiences, and satisfying for customers within an environment that allows us to respond to rapid changes and to ensure that the pace of change within our organization to be as fast, if not faster, than the external change. said Kaka.

The bank worked with a team of developers, designers, and specialists in the integration of Mendix, who led the project development and training and joined the staff of Albaraka of technologists limited. At the end of the project, the team of Albaraka well acquainted with the platform Mendix and felt confident in the creation and management of applications.

“The designer of Mendix UX, Brenda, allowed us to translate the hours of sketches of diagrams in beautiful models of high fidelity, which incorporated the best practices in Mendix to allow for easy re-use,” said Hamzah Asmall, manager of development and digitization of Albaraka. "The icons, cards, and widgets were chosen carefully to ensure that the delivery speed is maintained by using the definition in the early stages".

The result came to light in the app stores in may of 2021, after addressing and integrating over 650 items of comments and 300 user stories in eight sprints.

Next stop: secure applications and agile

Shortly after the start of the first confinement by the COVID-19, the Dutch Railways realized that had to change its business model. The number of passengers in the train are reduced to 10 per cent of the levels prior to the pandemic. In addition, the operators of trains-commercial public service knew that the safety of the passenger train was a major concern, and the new government regulations that would enforce capacity constraints.

“A challenge were the government's measures changing every two weeks, which forced us to be very agile in the way we approach our project. We also wanted to put it up as quickly as possible because of the urgency,” said Jitze de Groote, senior consultant at First Technologies. First Technologies helped to push the project of the Dutch Railways. “In addition, we needed to provide service to customers with our digital solution 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and with a huge user base of one million users, we expected a high-traffic”.

Banks also face unprecedented challenges in their business models. The business segment of brick-and-mortar has moved largely in line. The creation, maintenance, and the iteration of an application to the public requires many overhead costs in a traditional setting. In addition to new competition from companies that are technologically innovative seeking to benefit from the opportunities of digital financial services, the greatest concerns about cyber security and the changing nature of the business due to the pandemic are pushing for new government regulations.

Dutch Railways found a response in the platform code under Mendix, implementing a solution in just four weeks that revitalized the number of passengers, with more than 260 000 users of applications a month, and 30 000 new users per day. His approach highlights the agility with which a motivated team, and the platform Mendix can move to adapt to unexpected changes in the business.

The application of the Dutch Railways allowed the passengers to plan their journey, knowing that the capacity management services were available and keeping them safe. Dutch Railways increased services for niche markets, such as the transport of passengers on a bike and improved its protocols of accessibility for users with disabilities. Your focus on performance and the user interface is well-designed with the user experience clean delighted users since the launch, and allowed the Dutch Railways continue to grow despite the conditions, bad business during the pandemic.

The rapid time-to-market and the ability to iterate to face the new challenges of the market helped the Dutch Railways, and also can help financial services firms as they change the technologies and the business.

Give more money to their strategy of mobile banking

When banks and financial services companies talk about the digital strategy customer-oriented, in reality they refer to the experience of mobile banking and options architectural and offsets that define that experience. Choose the architecture right mobile can deeply affect the experience of the client in your applications, B2C, their ratings in the app stores and, ultimately, your end result. Therefore, before choosing the strategy architecture for mobile applications, be sure to know the use cases of your application and make sure you have the right platform to create, deploy, host and manage their applications.

According to Gartner, "Historically, in many organizations, the leaders of applications, chose a mobile architecture before determining the use-case; this is the other way around".

The options of mobile architecture more common are:

Mobile native: Widgets native, native controls to build screens, renderings via the GUI toolkit native. Offline capability, excellent performance, security, and integration API, but is considered costly with traditional development.

Responsive Web: runs inside a mobile browser. No more pinching and zooming! Cheaper to make, code, portable, presentation possibilities, but rank comparatively low in almost all other metrics, including the experience of the user.

Hybrid apps: native container/special browser that generates javascript and CSS. This bridge between web applications and native mobile responsive solves many problems and has excellent safety ratings; however, out of both means that the hybrid apps come with tradeoffs and functional characteristics.

Web progressive: it runs inside a mobile browser. The appearance of Native, access to devices functions in growth, less expensive than Native, but it also involves trade offs in performance and integration.

If the stand out line is critical to your application, then Native Mobile is the clear winner. On the other hand, if the presentation of the information must be perfect, Gartner recommends that the Web responsive or PWA.

“Now, this is what Mendix brings to the table: to be code under, we can eliminate the cost and portability of the code of the equation,” said David Brault, product marketing manager of Mendix, in his review of the findings of Gartner. “These are the two elements that most often do companies decide on an architecture mediocre and just relate to something they are more familiar or something that is easier, faster, and cheaper.”

With Mendix, deciding on an architecture becomes more manageable because it can remove all the restrictions and limitations that force companies to compromise. The platform code under Mendix enables enterprises to choose the architecture according to the use case: a native or browser-based, or a hybrid of the two, you can choose the ideal option for your application at all times.

“In Mendix, we adopt the best approach of its class when it comes to mobile devices,” said Brault. “Our ability to reduce the time of development, along with the fact that we have a single code base, allows you to focus on features and functions, rather than how hard it will be. How long will it take to build? How expensive is this going to be applied ?”

Create the best mobile architecture for your products, it will help you make the decisions of user experience that their financial services customers expect from a banking application, since the integration of voice to biometric identification. When it is based on the platform of Mendix, you can incorporate the functions of security best practices that their bank customers will appreciate.

Create a mobile banking app that your customers can count

With Mendix, financial services firms can develop, deliver and maintain excellent mobile banking applications that customers will enjoy. The platform Mendix is flexible and scalable and can help banks to respond to the changing demands of customers in less time and with fewer resources.

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