Enterprise Case Study: A Financial Services Company's Digital Transformation Journey with Low-Code in 2026
When Commonwealth Financial Group — a regional financial services company managing $12 billion in assets across 240 advisor teams in the Midwest and Southeast — undertook a digital transformation initiative in 2025, they faced a challenge familiar to many mid-sized financial services organizations: their client experience was being compared not to their direct competitors but to the digital experiences delivered by technology giants like Apple, Amazon, and Google. Clients who managed their investments through Commonwealth's outdated client portal — built in 2014 and minimally updated since — were the same people who banked through sleek mobile apps, shopped through personalized e-commerce experiences, and communicated through intuitive messaging platforms. The gap between what Commonwealth's technology delivered and what its clients expected was widening, and the firm's leadership recognized that closing that gap was not a technology initiative — it was a business survival imperative. Over 18 months, Commonwealth used a low-code platform to rebuild its client-facing digital experience, automate its internal advisory workflows, and modernize its compliance and reporting infrastructure — achieving what would have been a 3-5 year, $8-12 million transformation through traditional development in 18 months for under $2 million. This case study examines how they did it and what other financial services organizations can learn from their experience.
The Starting Point: A Digital Experience Gap That Threatened Growth
Commonwealth Financial Group entered 2025 with a technology landscape that was typical of mid-sized financial services organizations: a collection of systems accumulated over two decades, each serving a specific function but none working together to create a coherent client or advisor experience. The firm's core wealth management platform, provided by a major financial technology vendor, handled portfolio accounting and reporting reliably but offered limited client-facing digital capabilities and no support for the custom advisory workflows that differentiated Commonwealth's service model. The client portal, custom-built in 2014, was functional but dated — it lacked mobile optimization, provided no personalized insights, and required clients to navigate through multiple screens to find basic information about their portfolios. Internal workflows — new client onboarding, financial plan development, compliance review, account rebalancing — were managed through a combination of email, shared drives, and manual checklists that advisors and support staff had developed over years. These workflows worked, in the sense that they eventually produced the required outcomes, but they were slow, error-prone, and invisible to the management team that needed to understand operational performance and identify bottlenecks.
The trigger for action was a client experience survey conducted in late 2024 that revealed what the leadership team had feared: client satisfaction with the firm's digital experience was significantly below both industry benchmarks and the firm's own target, and 18% of clients indicated they had considered moving to a competitor specifically because of the firm's technology limitations. For a business built on long-term client relationships and recurring revenue from assets under management, the implications were clear and urgent. The CEO summarized the situation bluntly in a board presentation: "Our investment performance is strong, our advisors are excellent, and our clients trust us. But we are asking them to interact with us through technology that makes us look like we are stuck in 2015. If we do not fix this, we will lose clients to competitors who offer a modern digital experience — regardless of how good our investment advice is."
The Low-Code Approach: Modernizing the Experience Layer Without Replacing Core Systems
Commonwealth's approach to the transformation reflected a strategic decision that is increasingly common in financial services: rather than attempting to replace the firm's core wealth management platform — a project that would have cost $5-7 million, taken 3-4 years, and carried significant execution risk — the firm decided to build a modern digital experience layer on top of its existing core systems using a low-code platform. The core platform would continue to serve as the system of record for portfolio data, transactions, and reporting; the low-code platform would serve as the system of engagement — the digital experience that clients and advisors interacted with daily — composing data and functionality from the core platform and other systems into modern, intuitive interfaces.
This architectural decision — modernize the experience layer, preserve the core systems — is what made the 18-month timeline and sub-$2 million budget possible. Rather than migrating decades of historical data, rebuilding complex portfolio accounting logic, and retraining the entire organization on new core systems, the firm focused its resources on what clients and advisors actually saw and used: the client portal, the advisor dashboard, the onboarding workflow, the compliance review process. The Informat low-code platform was selected after evaluating multiple options based on its financial services compliance capabilities (SOC 2, encryption, audit logging), its pre-built integration with the firm's existing wealth management platform, and its ability to enable the firm's business analysts — who understood the advisory workflows and compliance requirements — to participate directly in application development alongside the IT team.
Implementation and Results
The transformation was executed in four phases over 18 months, each phase delivering tangible value before the next phase began — a deliberate strategy to build organizational confidence and maintain momentum. Phase 1 rebuilt the client portal as a responsive, personalized digital experience providing clients with a complete view of their financial picture, AI-generated portfolio insights, and secure document exchange with their advisors. Phase 2 built an advisor dashboard that unified client information, task management, and workflow tracking into a single interface, eliminating the need for advisors to navigate between multiple systems. Phase 3 automated the new client onboarding workflow, reducing the time from initial meeting to fully funded account from an average of 18 days to 5 days. Phase 4 digitized the compliance review and reporting processes, reducing review cycle time by 65% and providing the compliance team with complete visibility into review status and audit trails.
The results after full deployment exceeded the business case that had justified the investment. Client satisfaction with digital experience improved from the 32nd percentile to the 78th percentile against industry benchmarks. Client attrition, which had been trending upward, stabilized and began declining. Advisor productivity — measured by clients served per advisor — improved by 22% as administrative workflows that had consumed 8-10 hours per week were automated. And the compliance team, which had been a persistent bottleneck in the firm's growth, was able to support a 15% increase in new client volume without adding headcount. The firm's CEO described the transformation's impact succinctly: "We did not change our investment philosophy, our advisor talent, or our client service commitment. We changed the technology that connects our clients and advisors to our firm — and that changed everything."
Key Lessons for Financial Services Organizations
Commonwealth's transformation offers several lessons for other financial services organizations considering similar initiatives. The decision to modernize the experience layer rather than replace core systems was the single most important strategic choice — it dramatically reduced cost, timeline, and risk while delivering the improvements that clients and advisors actually cared about. The phased approach, with each phase delivering measurable value, built organizational confidence and prevented the loss of momentum that kills many transformation initiatives. The inclusion of business analysts — the people who understood advisory workflows and compliance requirements — in the development process ensured that the applications built actually supported how the firm operated rather than forcing the firm to adapt to the software. And the selection of a low-code platform with financial services-specific compliance capabilities eliminated the months of security and compliance review that would have been required for a custom-developed or generic platform solution.
Conclusion: A Playbook for Mid-Sized Financial Services
Commonwealth Financial Group's transformation represents a playbook that is increasingly being adopted by mid-sized financial services organizations: use low-code platforms to build modern digital experiences and automated workflows on top of existing core systems, deliver value incrementally in phases rather than through a big-bang transformation, and empower the people who understand the business — advisors, compliance officers, operations managers — to participate directly in building the technology that supports their work. The approach is not a compromise or a shortcut; it is a strategic choice that reflects the reality that client-facing digital experience, not back-office system modernization, is what drives competitive differentiation in financial services. The firms that follow this playbook will close the digital experience gap with their larger competitors. The firms that continue to wait for the perfect moment to replace their core systems will watch that gap widen.