Customer Success Story: Digital Transformation in Financial Services with Informat
When Meridian Financial (a composite of real customer experiences), a regional financial services company serving 200,000 customers across commercial lending, wealth management, and insurance products, assessed its technology landscape in 2024, the picture was sobering. Thirty-seven separate systems supported core business operations, many of which did not communicate with each other. Customer data was fragmented across platforms, forcing relationship managers to consult five or more systems to get a complete view of a client. Loan origination took an average of 23 days from application to approval. And the IT organization spent 75% of its budget maintaining legacy systems, leaving minimal capacity for digital innovation. Two years later, Meridian has transformed its operations — reducing loan origination time by 65%, giving relationship managers a unified 360-degree client view, and redirecting IT resources from maintenance to innovation. This is their story.
The Starting Point: Technology Fragmentation
Meridian's technology estate had grown through decades of acquisition and organic development. Each business line — commercial lending, wealth management, insurance — operated its own systems, many inherited from acquired companies and never integrated. Customer data was duplicated, inconsistent, and incomplete across platforms. Processes that should have been automated — credit checks, document collection, compliance verification — were manual, paper-intensive, and slow. The IT organization, talented but overwhelmed, spent its days keeping the existing systems running and responding to urgent business requests, with no capacity for strategic initiatives.
The CEO's mandate was clear but daunting: transform the customer experience, improve operational efficiency, and enable the business to launch new products faster — all without the multi-year, nine-figure core system replacement that had failed at several peer institutions. The Chief Digital Officer, newly hired to lead the transformation, recognized that a different approach was needed.
The Approach: Governed Low-Code Transformation
Rather than attempting to replace core systems, the CDO proposed an "innovate around the core" strategy using the Informat platform. Modern, low-code-built applications would provide the customer experience, workflow automation, and digital capabilities the business needed, while integrating with legacy systems through APIs and connectors rather than attempting to replace them. The core systems would remain the system of record — maintaining data integrity, regulatory compliance, and the business logic accumulated over decades — while the new digital layer would transform how customers and employees interacted with them.
The implementation was organized around business capabilities rather than technology projects. A Digital Factory — a dedicated team combining business, technology, and design expertise — was established to build and deploy capabilities in 90-day cycles. Each cycle delivered a complete, working capability — a digital loan application, a unified client portal, an automated compliance workflow — rather than a technology component that required subsequent cycles to become useful. This approach maintained business engagement, demonstrated value continuously, and enabled the team to learn and adapt its approach based on real user feedback.
Key Capabilities Delivered
Unified Client 360 Portal
The flagship capability: a single, comprehensive view of each client relationship, built on Informat and aggregating data from all 37 legacy systems. Relationship managers, who previously consulted multiple systems to understand a client's full relationship with Meridian, now have a single portal showing all accounts, policies, loans, interactions, upcoming renewals, and potential opportunities — with AI-powered insights highlighting clients who may need attention, cross-sell opportunities, and retention risks. The portal was built in 12 weeks, compared to an estimated 18-month timeline for custom development. Relationship manager productivity — measured by clients served per RM — improved by 40%.
Digital Loan Origination
The transformation of Meridian's commercial lending process: a fully digital application and approval workflow that reduced loan origination time from 23 days to 8 days. Digital applications capture borrower information once — no re-keying across systems. Automated credit checks, document verification, and compliance screening eliminate manual steps that previously consumed days. Intelligent workflow routing sends applications to the right underwriters based on loan type, size, and complexity. And real-time status visibility — for both the borrower and the relationship manager — eliminates the "black hole" experience that characterized the previous manual process.
Results and Lessons Learned
Eighteen months into the transformation, Meridian's results speak for themselves: 65% reduction in loan origination time, 40% improvement in relationship manager productivity, 12 major capabilities delivered (each in 90 days or less), and IT spending shifted from 75% maintenance/25% innovation to 45% maintenance/55% innovation. The lessons Meridian would share with other financial services organizations: innovate around the core, don't try to replace it (core systems contain decades of business logic and compliance; wrap them, don't rip them out), deliver complete capabilities in short cycles (maintains business engagement and demonstrates value continuously), and invest in integration as much as application development (the digital layer is only as good as its connection to the systems of record). Meridian's journey continues — but the foundation they have built, combining governed low-code development with a pragmatic approach to legacy integration, has proven its ability to deliver transformational results at startup speed within a regulated, risk-conscious financial services environment.