Application development made 10x faster: the Appian way

“I was the CEO of a fintech for about a year and a half, and I wish I had known about Appian back then,” quips Rick Browne, Regional Vice President Financial Services APJ for Appian.

This first-hand experience gives Browne, a seasoned technology leader, a unique insight into the pain fintechs and financial service providers endure. Browne has had a varied career, living and working on four continents. He started in North America before spending seven years in Latin America and four years in Europe. He has spent the last 12 years in Singapore, where he resides today.

“Appian is an application platform that allows you to do a very complex thing in a simple way,” Browne deftly explains. The low-code platform allows companies to build powerful applications quickly and at enterprise scale, combining process extraction with drag-and-drop functionality. The business works closely with a wide range of financial partners, including major banks, capital markets firms, insurance companies and lenders.

One of the jewels in Appian’s crown is its speed-to-deployment. “We build applications 10 times faster than traditional ways,” says Browne. Especially for fintechs, this is incredibly important. The time advantage means Appian’s partners can scale quickly by easily rolling out new workflows and applications; The end result can be duplicated across other product lines or different geographies, while the cloud-based nature allows them to integrate with existing ecosystem partners or SaaS components.

Appian is proud of its “fantastic” partnership with Pepper Money

Among the most important partnerships in recent years is the work Appian has done with Pepper Money, the largest non-bank lender in Australia and New Zealand. Competition for talent is so fierce that companies are increasingly struggling to attract Java or .NET developers. By adopting low-code solutions, they can instead reduce the complexity of bringing an application to market while increasing the “diversity of talent” within their ranks.

“The partnership with Pepper Money is nothing short of amazing,” says Browne. “The things we do with them today are market leading. Pepper Money saw that they needed to rethink how their business was built. They were building things with many different systems piecemeal, complex underwriting and lending decisions put into very complicated business rule spreadsheets, and they had to do something different. They saw the future as low code because it allows them to innovate, do more with less and bring products to market faster.”

Pepper Money’s CEO challenged Appian to demonstrate what was possible in one weekend. Browne and his team worked around the clock to have something ready by Monday morning. When time is your biggest cheerleader, prospects often lay gloves like this. By choosing Appian, Pepper Money was able to build a new mortgage broker loan application for New Zealand, and go from concept to production – in a market where they had never been present before – in just three months.

Appian’s success has led to growth of around 35% a year; in Asia and the Pacific, that growth doubles on an annual basis. “We’re basically looking at a fire hose for growth,” Browne says as he looks ahead. “As we deal with this tremendous growth, a big priority is also to keep this great culture that we have. Customers know that we have the best platform, but they also know that we have the best people. So we’re looking for the best people to to be part of the best platform, and help customers who want to innovate on Appian. That’s the fun ahead of us.”