BrainBlog for Zoho by Jason Bloomberg
The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 rapidly transformed daily life as well as business operations across the globe. The sudden move to work-from-home upended office life as governments sought to mitigate the impact on both consumers and businesses.
The United States Congress took unprecedented steps to address the economic impact of the pandemic with the CARES act and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for small businesses.
To participate in the PPP, banks across the country had to implement end-to-end commercial lending apps in just two weeks—an unheard of amount of time.
Traditional software development approaches simply weren’t up to the task. Low-code was the only technology that had any hope of supporting such accelerated timeframes.
How T Bank delivered its PPP application
One financial institution that tackled this challenge was T Bank, a division of Tectonic Financial, Inc. When Congress passed the CARES Act, T Bank’s leadership knew they had to offer PPP loans—quickly. As Congress drafted the legislation, Haag Sherman, CEO of Tectonic Financial, directed David Clifford, Chief Strategy Officer, to build a custom portal where T Bank could process PPP applications.
T Bank had previously worked with Trailguide Digital, a professional services firm that had helped build applications for Tectonic using the Zoho Creator low-code platform.
T Bank and Trailguide worked together to scope out the first phase of the PPP, which enabled customers to apply for PPP loans and the bank to process and approve them.
Because part of the development work focused on the user interface, another part on internal workflow, and the rest on document processing, using a low-code tool that could handle all three challenges was the obvious—and, really—the only choice.
The application development team consisted of Clifford and Matt Gallegly, owner and consultant from Trailguide. Given the small team size and accelerated timeframe for delivering the PPP application, T Bank decided to use Zoho Creator.
Dealing with the rapid, ongoing change in requirements was essential to the success of the initiative. “The requirements for the PPP Portal were complex and evolving,” Clifford explained. “Having a platform like Creator allowed us to quickly build, revise, and iterate as we went in a very intuitive way to stay one step ahead of the needs of both customers and internal staff users.”
Zoho Creator was an essential part of this delivery process. “Creator enabled us to construct an end-to-end solution for PPP loan origination in two weeks,” Clifford continued. “And Zoho allowed us to move at a pace that the big banks couldn’t move at.”
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
