Modernising complex operations while building on established business systems

The challenge

Mortgage back-office specialists were managing long-running financing cases across five systems and about 40 screens. A single case could remain active for 12–18 months, requiring the coordination of more than 70 document types and around 90 business conditions.

While front-office advisers had an integrated solution for managing financing cases, back-office teams had to move between the core banking system, CRM and several document-management systems. Document requirements, receipt statuses, due dates and case progress were partly maintained as free-text CRM entries.

This meant that experienced employees were spending significant effort reconstructing process state, tracking outstanding documents and conditions, initiating follow-ups and keeping multiple systems aligned.

The bank wanted to standardise and automate these activities while retaining its established systems as authoritative sources of business data.

The approach

Norify’s principal architect worked directly with the bank’s business and technology teams to translate these operational requirements into a solution architecture connecting process automation with core banking, CRM and document-management capabilities.

The architecture uses Flowable to orchestrate the process around the bank’s existing systems, without creating another system of record. Critical banking data remains authoritative in the core banking system, while scalable APIs and event-driven integration make the information required by the process available when and where it is needed.

The resulting workflow provides back-office specialists with a unified view of the financing process. Document statuses and due dates can be tracked automatically, documents reconciled with their source systems, CRM information updated, and follow-up communication triggered without employees manually reconstructing the state of each case.

Automation deliberately stops where human judgement adds value. Employees remain responsible for evaluating document content, assessing data quality and making business decisions.

Designed for resilience

Process automation should not make critical operations dependent on the availability of another application.

The solution was therefore designed so that employees can continue working in the core banking system during a failure of the workflow platform or surrounding services. Cases affected by manual changes can be identified and reconciled after recovery, protecting human updates from being overwritten by subsequent automated processing.

Transactional changes use synchronous integration where immediate consistency is required, while appropriate data and document events are distributed asynchronously. This balances process responsiveness and system independence with the consistency requirements of banking operations.

From architecture to production

Norify’s responsibility extended beyond producing the architecture.

After taking the solution through the bank’s architecture governance process, Norify’s principal architect remained responsible for turning it into a production-ready capability: establishing Flowable within the bank’s private-cloud environment, integrating enterprise identity and access management, connecting the required banking and document services, and establishing reliable automated deployment and lifecycle management.

The engagement combined solution architecture with hands-on implementation and specialist Flowable expertise. This made it possible to address challenges spanning process design, integration, security, infrastructure and application delivery without repeatedly handing problems between isolated technical disciplines.

Building internal capability

Mortgage financing was selected as the pilot for a broader process-automation initiative, with more than 40 additional business cases identified for future consideration.

The objective was therefore not to create a bespoke mortgage application or long-term dependency on external specialists. Norify worked alongside the bank’s analysts and Flowable modelers, providing the integration foundation, architecture, prototypes and specialist guidance needed for internal teams to progressively take ownership of process development.

The result is a foundation for evolving business processes more independently from the longer change cycles of established banking systems.