The Bonita Platform from Bonitasoft Earns Our Editor’s Choice™ Award for Providing Finserv Dev Teams with Open-Source Tools to Create Engaging User Interfaces

In a Nutshell: Finserv companies across the globe are undergoing digital transformations that change the way customers and employees each engage with the business. A specialist in open-source business process management and digital transformation software, Bonitasoft provides free access to a limited version of its open-source development solution, Bonita. An annual subscription fee enables the full power of the recently released Bonita 7.6, used by Finserv companies to design applications that improve access to budgeting, cash flow forecasts, approval cycles, and consolidated financial statements. //

While walking down a busy street during a recent trip to Portland, Oregon, my cellphone started buzzing in my pocket. Unsure what it was, I sidestepped the foot traffic and found a quiet corner to take a peek.

A push notification from my bank told me that, although it sensed I was out of town, a branch was less than two blocks away should I need anything.

While I hadn’t requested such notifications and didn’t need to visit the bank, it was nice to know the option was available if the need arose during my trip.

Small, but effective, notifications like these are part of the digital transformations of Finserv companies worldwide. Previously content with simply providing solid banking products and account access through branches, financial service providers now look to create user interfaces on customers’ computer and cellphone screens that improve their experiences and drive more traffic into physical locations.

Aside from the customer experience, these transformations via applications also include a revamping of the way companies conduct back-office operations, giving employees new and innovative ways to do their jobs more effectively.

But technology changes and regularly renders obsolete the tools and programs used to create and maintain applications. For Finserv companies unable to maintain large DevOps teams, finding a program that is current, easy and affordable to use, and provides a set of robust features, is a must.

Bonitasoft, a specialist in open-source business process management and digital transformation software, aims to be the solution to those challenges. The company’s open-source platform allows development teams to create seamless, engaging, and personalized digital enterprise-grade applications.

Users can choose from off-the-shelf, visual design, or completely custom-coded UI design — or use a mix of all three approaches. Bonita includes a specialized UI Designer to create responsive user interfaces composed of dynamic HTML5 or Javascript pages with forms, graphs, charts, data, and more.

“The program helps companies manage their digital transformation and is considered low-code for developers,” said Carole Winqwist, VP of Marketing at Bonitasoft. “That means that, depending on your development team, you can either code everything yourself or go with a user-interface assisted implementation.”

Finserv companies are already using the solution to develop internal and customer-facing applications that handle loan processes, distributions of offers through distribution networks, and credit card and credit line approval.

“We have multiple customers in the world of financial services because there’s a big digital transformation trend there,” Winqwist said. “In order to improve the customer experience, a lot of financial companies have invested in developing new applications.”

For its ability to provide Finserv development teams with flexible, UI design tools, Bonitasoft has earned our Editor’s Choice™ Award.

Bonita currently has more than 1,000 customers in 75 countries, and an ecosystem of over 120,000 members, making it the largest provider of open-source business process management, low-code, and digital transformation software worldwide.

The solution can be in tiers by development teams. The first tier includes free access to a limited, community supported version of the open-source program. The second tier includes a subscription service that enables full access to the recently updated Bonita 7.6, with professional support and advanced features, for an annual fee.

“Since we use only open-source software, it integrates really easily into the ID of any of our customers,” Winqwist said. “You can plug the system into your back office or front office in a very easy way.”

Bonita 7.6 comes with a brand-new platform add-on, Bonita Continuous Delivery, which automates the provisioning of the Bonita platform so that deployment takes just a few minutes.The update also provides multiple environment deployments and better maintenance and license management

“This technical feature will allow DevOps to go much faster and deploy a solution in less than a minute on the cloud,” Winqwist said.

A January 2018 partnership agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) permits companies to effectively operate the Bonita platform with Amazon AWS cloud technology.

“With cloud-based access through AWS, digital process applications on the Bonita platform are easily highly distributed and secure,” said Miguel Valdes Faura, CEO and Founder of Bonitasoft, in a press release. “We are pleased to have AWS as part of our partner ecosystem.”

Bonita is available to businesses and developers in all sectors but has found a growing fan base among Finserv companies engaging in their digital transformation.

Current uses in the financial services community include a Bonita-based application used to manage loan approvals with 29 processes, more than 2,600 users, and an average of 800,000 instances a year. Designed applications through Bonita also run mobile wallets and payment processes, while maintaining the strict security required by any financial entity.

On the backend, Bonita is also used to manage budgeting, cash flow forecasts, approval cycles, and consolidated financial statements.

Along with the recent release of Continuous Delivery, Winqwist said the company also plans a June 2018 rollout of further updates that focus on Artificial Intelligence modules that are able to predict the time a process will take.

This will factor mostly into back-office operations, but has several potential uses for Finserv organizations.

Winqwist gave the example of a bank employee working on loan approvals. Many institutions have a service-level agreement (SLA) with customers saying they will respond to applications within 48 hours. The artificial intelligence model can be used to measure whether the SLA will be met and will suggest actions for the SLA to be met.

These types of innovations are the driving force behind the digital transformations of Finserv companies around the globe. No longer content with just being branch-level service providers, these companies use the latest technology look for ways to meet the needs of customers and employees, wherever they may be.

With its recent introduction of Bonita 7.6 and future plans for solution add-ons, Bonitasoft is in a strong position to continue its run as the largest provider of open-source business process management, low-code, and digital transformation software worldwide.