Archway Speeds Development of Banking Products by 4X with AWS and Mendix

Archway Software, a technology solution provider for regional and local banks, spun off from WaFd Bank’s (Washington Federal) innovation lab after it used Mendix to build out its online banking and contact center portal in just 10 months. WaFd saw the potential for its Mendix products to help other banks deliver on innovation and founded Archway. As a low-code development platform that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Mendix allowed WaFd to create a portal without incurring significant technical debt. Today, Archway helps banks get up and running with online portals four times faster than traditional providers thanks to Mendix and AWS.

After successfully building an online banking and contact center portal by collaborating with AWS Partner Mendix using the Mendix Platform, the innovation team inside WaFd decided to create Archway Software to help other mid-market banks and financial institutions seeking digital freedom. The goal of Archway was to use low-code solutions deployed on AWS to provide customers with a customizable and expandable out-of-the-box experience, ensuring long-term market sustainability. After creating Archway, the next step was to take the existing WaFd portals and prepare them for broader consumption.

With Mendix, the Archway team reused components and modules of the WaFd portals as a jumping off point for its mass-market version. Mendix was instrumental in helping Archway enhance efficiency and scalability within its development process. “It takes about 4-6 weeks for us to feel like new developers are ready to do commercial-grade programming in Mendix,” said Dustin Hubbard, president at Archway. “During that time their mindset shifts, and they always end up commenting on how much faster they can work.”

In addition, the composability and IP protection offered by Mendix enabled Archway to decouple the online banking solution from WaFd to become a configurable solution for other regional banks. The reusability of developing with low code has since enabled Archway to bring new features to its customers at a pace that is four times faster than traditional technology providers in the financial services industry.

A significant part of Archway’s success is the role that AWS plays in its solutions and platform. “Everything Archway does is hosted in AWS and Mendix operates in AWS as well,” Hubbard said. “The fact that both organizations are working together makes things much easier. I can bring Mendix and AWS onto a call and everyone speaks the same language. This is very helpful, especially when you’re trying to innovate and bring different pieces together.”

For the backend of the online portal, the team at WaFd collaborated with AWS Professional Services (AWS ProServ) to build a serverless data lake. The data lake leverages Amazon Personalize to customize cross-sell marketing email campaigns. In addition, Archway’s voice and chat bot tools utilize Amazon Polly and Amazon Transcribe to convert between speech and text. It also uses Amazon Lex to support customer self-service through voice-based call center systems. “I call AWS the world’s greatest parts supplier—AWS is always innovating in ways that can be applied to our platform,” Hubbard said.

A prime example of Archway’s digital innovation is its customer 360 tool, which helps banks understand their relationships with each client. It gives branch employees greater visibility into their customer data, including the client’s account history, duration of banking, external account holdings, and survey feedback. Using Amazon Lex, the customer 360 tool shows how customers are interacting with their banks either through chat or voice calls and helps pinpoint next best actions. “Amazon Lex is driving a lot of insight around natural language,” said Tad Neeley, vice president of business development at Archway. “Amazon Personalize uses artificial intelligence to look at millions of data points in our data lake and determine which product would benefit clients based on all their past interactions.”

Looking ahead, Archway will continue to leverage AWS and Mendix to co-innovate with regional and community financial institutions seeking to modernize. The software company believes that banks should be able to build and deploy applications faster than has been traditionally possible with legacy technology. Archway wants to put the power of banking in its customers’ hands with a low-code, accessible solution complete with the support of its development team.

“At Archway, we’re willing to take on way more than almost everybody,” said Todd Tower, customer success and operations senior executive at Archway. “A lot of firms are up for building the middleware but require a third party at some point. Not us. We’ll sign up for all of it. We’ll help you from ideation to production.”