Intellyx Development Stories video for Zoho, featuring Jason Bloomberg, David Clifford, & Matt Gallegly
Jason Bloomberg, President, Intellyx, chats with Mr David Clifford, Chief Strategy Officer, Tectonic Financial; and Matt Gallegly, owner and principal consultant at Trailguide Digital, a Zoho Partner, to understand Tectonic’s journey with Zoho Creator.
Highlights:
00:12 – Introduction
00:44 – Overview of Tectonic and T Bank
1:27 – Introduction to Trailguide Digital
2:00 – Beginning of Tectonic’s low-code journey
5:52 – Apps built on Creator
18:18 – APIs and Integrations
19:23 – Tectonic Financials’ use cases
22:23 – Developers onboarding
26:27 – Future plans
Click here to watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SBYK_ltXma8
Zoho DevDays#CS1-Tectonic-Sep2022 Transcript
Jason Bloomberg: Hi everybody. This is Jason Bloomberg with Intellyx and welcome to our video about Tectonic Financial and their experiences with Zoho Creator. So I have two professionals joining me today. We have David Clifford, the chief strategy officer of Tectonic Financial. And we have Matt Gallegly, the CEO and lead consultant at Trailguide Digital.
And these two gentlemen work closely together on a lot of different projects at Tectonic and its T Bank division. And it’d be great to sort of hear from these fellows, you know, what their experiences are overall, but let’s start Dave with you. Can you give us a quick overview about Tectonic and T Bank in.
Dave Clifford: Sure. Thanks, Jason. Yeah. So Tectonic Financial Inc is a financial holding company and we’re NASDAQ traded – TECTP is the symbol. And we have a series of financial services, businesses that. That are across the array of financial services industry. So we have a bank at the core.
We have a couple of investment management firms. We have an insurance agency, and then we also have a factoring business that’s in the trucking industry. But I would say all of our businesses tend to skew on the smaller, on the smaller side of things.
Jason Bloomberg: So Matt, why don’t you give us a brief introduction to your company as well and, and what you’re doing with Tectonic.
Matt Gallegly: Sure. Yeah. So Trailguide is authorized Zoho partners. We’ve been working with Zoho you know, specifically for a number of years, building custom applications and working with clients like Tectonic and T Bank to help them, get the most out of the Zoho Suite. And that’s what we do day in and day out for T Bank amongst other clients.
Jason Bloomberg: Well, very good. So I’d like to discuss Tectonic’s journey with low code broadly. And we’ll get zero in on some specifics, but Dave, where did it start? And can you give us an example of an early project you, you did maybe with Matt’s help with low code.
Dave Clifford: Sure. Yeah. So I joined Tectonic in 2018 and pretty shortly thereafter, I started looking at the various technology platforms that were out there where we could do some custom things with portals and, and workflow tools.
And. It became evident to me that, that the trend in the industry, particularly for a business like ours, that wasn’t a massive business, like a JP Morgan or a Bank of America. The trend was clearly towards low code. So we started to look at the various platforms that were out there looking at the, the charts of, you know, the competitors and the challengers and, and those things that the analysts put out there.
And we narrowed our search down to Zoho Creator and a couple of other platforms. And we ultimately chose Zoho Creator as our platform of choice That was in 2019. And so we started to play around with the platform ourselves and we built a couple of applications for our retirement business.
And while we did see there was a lot of power and a lot of things that we could accomplish with the low code platform, I learned pretty quickly that we could get a lot more out of the Zoho Creator platform. If we worked. An expert. And so in the middle of 2019, we, we came across Trailguide and I can’t say enough positive things about Matt.
It, it always pains me to do so, because I know he’s gonna, he’s gonna spend his time with other clients, but Matt’s incredible. And so we started working with Matt and in the middle of 2019, and I think the first application that we built was for our bank trust department, they have a retirement platform. And so we built an onboarding solution for, for that business, that had some workflow and client facing components to it.
Jason Bloomberg: So Matt, anything to add to that?
Matt Gallegly: Yeah, no, that that’s yeah, a accurate, and I appreciate the compliments as always, but but yeah, no, I think that was a good representation of, of kind of how we got things going and You know, that was yeah, that, that first portal we, we built out is still in use today.
And I think in fact, we met yesterday and talked about some features to add to it. So, as most of these things tend to, to be it’s it’s you have the initial idea. And sometimes there’s a version 2, and often there’s there’s features and things that can added over time. So, you know, it’s been, been beneficial not only to be able to put an application out there.
In the low code space, but be able to easily adjust it as needed. Right. Because I mean, the world changes and the business changes and people at the business change and process there’s been, how many hundreds of little adjustments over time that are, that are almost unnoticeable, because they’re so easy to make.
Right. So just, just for what it’s worth, I think that’s an interesting angle on that initial portal we built out.
Dave Clifford: Hundred percent agree with that. And I think this is to your earlier question, Jason. One of, you know, our business is very broad and we’re pretty small. So the, you know, the team that manages this business.
And so we love having a platform that can evolve as we go along. And that’s the nice thing about low code. We can take a very agile approach to development. We can, you know, release software updates pretty much constantly with the low code platform and we can make changes very easily and. We love that about it.
That that’s been one of the, the biggest advantages of, of the Creator platform.
Matt Gallegly: Yeah. It’s a little bit of a have your, have your cake and eat it too. Right? You can, you can build real things that are very robust and capable, but they’re not also, they don’t become this you know, monolith that can’t be modified easily as well.
So yeah, it’s exactly. Yeah.
Dave Clifford: And
Matt Gallegly: actually from my perspective, yeah, it’s great to work with that. You’re not stuck in it. stuck with this thing that you, you know, have to live with. So yeah, it’s great.
Jason Bloomberg: So the application that you folks worked on that I’m most familiar with with is the the paycheck protection program or PPP application that T Bank put together.
And the reason I’m familiar with it is I wrote up a case study for you folks, and it’ll be on the Zoho website shortly, if it isn’t already. So you can get more in depth information on that. But now that I have you two gentlemen on the, on the video, if you could sort of give us an idea of what was the initial motivation for this PPP application?
And tell us a bit about sort of how it played out. How did you put it together and how did it work and sort of give, give the audience an idea of sort of what their story was with that?
Dave Clifford: Sure. So if we you know, go back to, to, when we first started working with low code, that was, that was in the middle of 2019.
And, and over the, the fall of that year. So, you know, October, November, December of 2019, Matt and I had. A couple of applications together, well, fast forward to March of 2020, and you know, the world ends and I was on spring break actually at the time. And, and I got a call from our CEO and he said, Hey look.
He’s he’s a lawyer by background. So he’s very focused on legislation and, and he was up to, to speed on everything that was going on. And he said, look, there’s gonna be a very big push by the government to get money in, into the hands of these small businesses that really need it in order for their survival.
And we want to make sure that we can get the money to our borrowers, because there’s gonna be a limited amount of money out there. Right? They, the, there was a certain amount of money that would get approved and, and we needed to be. Able to put or process these applications as quickly as possible so that our borrowers would, would be protected during that period of time.
So we started, he said, look, we need a portal. It’s gonna have to have a, you know, backend workflow processing component to it. And then some way to get that data to the SBA and oh yeah, you’re gonna have two weeks to do it. Right. So. We started on March 25th, Matt and I. So the team, the development team was, was me and Matt.
And then we had heavy involvement from the SBA team at the bank, the small business administration team on the testing and, and feedback and, and telling us what kind of features they needed. But yeah, we started on March 25th and we accepted the first application on April 4th. So it would, it was an absolutely.
Amazing example of what low code can do. I just two people, you know, 24 hours a day for, for nine days, a lot of caffeine and and boom, you know, we had, we had this, this portal out there and the feedback that we got from both the SBA team who was having to go through this process, cause it was a massive workload on them, right.
We ultimately processed 1600 loans over the two spans of, of PPP or the two cycles of PPP. But it was a massive workload on them. And they were really grateful that the, the tool was so efficient, helped them process these applications so efficiently. So great, great example of, of the power of low code and really a perfect use case for, for low code.
Matt Gallegly: Yeah. Yeah. And I think you know, in that 10 days of development, you had two days, you were in the car getting back from spring break. So slowed us down a bit more, but but no, yeah, it was remarkable to pull it together and there was certainly a little bit of the right place at the right time type of thing.
And there was you know all the staff at the bank was very helpful, like Dave mentioned on, on the testing and feedback. And so yeah, the objective was very clear. And it was largely up to us to come up with the process to achieve the objective. Right. So you know, I think that was, there were a lot of factors that went into it, but sure.
Having the right tool that could get anywhere close to meeting the timeline and the capabilities of what we were trying to achieve certainly helped.
Dave Clifford: yeah, that’s right. So, go ahead, Jason.
Jason Bloomberg: Well, one of the things I find fascinating about this PPP example is, you say, okay, we had two weeks to put up a portal and it’s like, well, big deal…
Anybody can put up a portal in two weeks, but there was a lot more to this application than, than meets the eye because first of all, it was a commercial lending application, right. Banks usually take years to roll out new commercial lending applications. Right. So this whole timeframe was just unheard of.
And then there were multiple parts of it. You mentioned the, the backend workflow. And part of that was for the people processing loans, but there was also the underwriters, the ones that had approved them. And then there was the piece that communicated information to the SBA. And then there was additional work to collect additional information from the customers applying.
Right. If they didn’t submit everything up front, so there was back and forth with the customers. And then this was just for the loans. The, the approvals themselves. Then there was also the, the, the forbearance afterward as well, which was another component too. So if you just sort of flesh out a bit, the, sort of, the level of complexity of what you managed to accomplish, cause it really is astounding when you start getting into the details.
Dave Clifford: For sure. Yeah. So, I mean, and to your point, I think the one piece of feedback we got from a customer early in the process, bears that out, what you just said, where they had had a friend that had applied at three different large banks. And none of those banks even looked at their application by the time that we had processed their loan already.
And so the complexity of the application was pretty significant given that, we had a portal where we would check the eligibility of a borrower through a series of forms. They would upload all of the documentation that was required. We would archive that information.
We would review the information that came through, be able to validate it or reject it with a message back to the borrower. Every step of the workflow from underwriting to closing to funding of the loan was processed through the portal, the document generation. So we generated all the loan, closing documents through the portal.
We had an API integration with a platform called Webmerge that that helped do that. We did 11,000 Zoho Signs. So that’s another, one of the things that we love about Creator is, is, you know, we use the Zoho One version of it. So we have these integrations with the other suite, the other applications in the Zoho One suite.
So yeah, you name it. Whatever’s part of underwriting alone. It, it was included in, in this portfolio or this, this.
Matt Gallegly: Yeah. And the, yeah, it was all, all part of the automation, which, you know, the volume of applications that you were able to process was, I mean, a thousand times normal to say the least, right.
And. You know, the, the backend process, what I found was that it was a full underwriting process, even though it was this short timeframe loan. It didn’t mean there were shortcuts on the work and the background that every, you know, the bank had to do to make sure that the right people were getting the money.
And so. You know, I, I think it was convenient and secure if that’s the right word in terms of, you know, compliance for the bank and ensuring there was no fraud and all that at the same time. So usually, you know, security and convenience are, are, you know, opposed to one another. But in this case, I think it was, it was both and in a lot of ways, which was, which was fun to watch.
And then Dave, you didn’t, didn’t get to the part about the forgiveness process. Right. But that was again, kind of the low code. Gave us the ability to, to get the front end, right. Get the money to the borrowers that needed it to keep the, you know, keep people employed. But then, you know, there was the whole process, which was literally coming out and changing as we were building it in terms of the rules of the forgiveness process and, you know, over 150 K or under 150 K and there ended up being four different versions of the forgiveness application.
And we, we programmed all that in, you know, which. I
Dave Clifford: mean, it’s just kind, I had blocked all of that out, man. I
Matt Gallegly: was gonna, I dunno if it’s PTSD but yeah, once you start cataloging all the individual pieces that we worked through just day to day to day to day, I mean, it was over the course of nine months eventually before we got all the forgiveness, you know.
Lots and lots of tiny little things that just, nickles and dimes add up to some pretty, pretty big stuff. But yeah, the forgiveness process, from a coding perspective was very interesting and challenging, right? I mean, it’s good to have challenges and bad to have challenges.
And I think when you solve those problems, it feels good. So that was certainly a challenge to get all that, you know, complexity program in the system. And I think everybody got through. Everyone got forgiven, we did it.
Dave Clifford: We got everybody through and I think one of the aspects of low code that maybe gets missed is low code is a misnomer, right? I mean, Matt literally codes all day and or he manages people that code. So, you know, it is low code in that you can get an application up and running with very little code, right. But then you can take that application and you can turbocharge it with as much code as you want to.
And that’s what happened with the PPP portal where, you know, in the beginning, not all of the submissions were through API to the SBA, but then eventually all of that stuff got coded in. There was a lot of functionality added to, to the forgiveness process over time. So, you know, Matt was constantly adding to the code in the application.
But from day one, we had a functional application. So, you know, it’s low code to get started. And then you can add code to it as you want to enhance it, as you want to increase the amount of automation. I love that about the low code, because you get something out there. I think that’s one of the, the tenets of good software development.
Just put something out there that works and solves a problem and then enhance it over time. Yeah.
Matt Gallegly: But I was gonna say, yeah, I think the low code, sometimes there is a lot of code you know, I’ve heard Creator and Zoho One in general described as kind of a toolbox.
Right. And you can build whatever you want out of it. And I was thinking about that analogy and I, I do think it’s good, but I think, you know, with something like Creator in addition to the toolbox, you have a lot of the material, right? If you’re thinking about construction, you gotta pile of lumber, standing there.
In fact, you’ve already got walls built. You just gotta stand them up. Right. so it gives you, you know, the, the word platform. I think of a lot too. It’s a platform to build on. You already got a foundation.
Dave Clifford: That’s right, Matt, like with the customer portal piece, I was thinking about that the other day.
Out of the box. You have the ability to Zoho gives you authentication permissioning, you know custom domains. So like, you know, to use Matt’s analogy, you’ve got basically the frame of the house already there and you just gotta start putting up the drywall. Yep. Exactly.
Jason Bloomberg: Yeah. You mentioned APIs and you pointed out that you built the API support down the road aways, and that wasn’t because you didn’t think of it, or it was too hard for you.
It was because the SBA didn’t support it at the beginning. Right? The SBA that, you know, this is this sort of stodgy old government agency. And at the beginning of this project, in spite of the fact that Congress ordered the PPP process, they had this archaic XML file upload process that was basically obsolete.
So you weren’t even doing it that way. And eventually they added the APIs and now you could support that, which is the modern way of uploading information, but it wasn’t that there was some limitation on your side for not doing that right off the bat. It was, it was the SBAs limitation. And this was part of the story.
Right? You mentioned that the forbearance business logic would continue to change. And the original application process, I remember changed at least three times during those first two weeks, right. Where, you know, just because Congress makes a law doesn’t mean that everybody knows what to do. So there had to be all, you know, SBA had to come and say, well, this is how you should do it.
This is how you should do it. And they kept, you know, they had very little time to make those decisions as well. So this is a very odd business situation where not only do the customer’s requirements evolve, but the fundamental landscape, right? The, the underlying regulatory framework that supports what you’re trying to do is like filling in as you go.
And that is just such a difficult situation. It’s hard to even imagine approaching that from a traditional coding perspective. I mean, how would you even do this some other way?
Dave Clifford: I agree. And I, and then Matt can comment on this, but I think, we, as a small community bank, we weren’t even given access to the same development.
You know, the environments that the bigger banks were given access to because those automated submissions were kind of reserved for the big banks at that point. So we ended up using robotic process automation in the first phase to submit loan applications, which we were able to connect up to Creator, to do that.
Matt Gallegly: It was a very enlightening civics lesson for an IT guy to see how the government, delivers services, which, you know, I mean, ultimately it was a good program and I think it helped a lot of people, but, to see the iterations of how the law gets put into action was interesting.
And then, I couldn’t agree more that, to keep up with those iterations on the implementation of the policy would have been hard to do otherwise. Right. with the traditional development.
Jason Bloomberg: Yeah. So let’s move on to some other examples. What else is T bank or the Tectonic organization generally doing with the Zoho Creator?
Can you go take us through another example or two?
Dave Clifford: Sure. Yeah. So one of the businesses that we most recently added to our portfolio is Integra funding. It’s a transportation factoring business. So if I’m a truck driver we would purchase your receivables and give you a discounted rate on that.
So we built an onboarding portal for that business, where if truckers on the road and they want to get signed up they use our Creator application to submit the documents and sign contracts so that they can get onboarded. It also has a backend workflow piece where we process those documents as they come in, I would say in most cases in our business kind of the way I think about it, each of our financial services, businesses has a core platform.
So in the bank it’s a bank core and you’re never gonna replace as a small bank. What FIS has built to process bank transactions. Right? So what we do is we use the low code in all of our businesses to layer on a client onboarding / client service piece, you know, kind of a portal to interact with clients and then a workflow tool on the backside of that.
And so that we we’ve done that in our Integra business, we’ve done that in the retirement planning business. We’re working on actually for our – Matt’s deep in the weeds on this with his team on a, a loan, origination portal that we have, they, they built us a loan monitoring system.
So whenever we need updated information from a borrower we use a Zoho Creator solution for that. So Zoho touches every business that we have now. Zoho Creator.
Matt Gallegly: Yeah. Among other things. And Zoho Sign is still, very actively used, Zoho Desk is even incorporated in there for some of the customer support things.
So Creator is definitely the core of the Zoho world that you take most advantage of, but BS in CRM, you know, we’re working on that as well. So, using all those different options where it makes sense, but yeah it’s generally a customer facing portal.
And customer service type activities.
Jason Bloomberg: Yeah. So you both mentioned Zoho Sign that’s Zoho’s DocuSign alternative and anytime a signature is needed, especially in an online context. It’s great to have that kind of application. And then Zoho Desk mentioned is Zoho’s help desk application.
So and it’s part of the Zoho One suite there’s over 40 applications now. So you mentioned onboarding and David, you talked about the, this factoring business and you talked about retirement. So you have these different onboarding, so there’s commonality, right? It’s all onboarding, but then customer needs are different and the business needs are different.
So how did you handle sort of doing onboarding a bunch of different times but with some differences, I mean, especially with a small team, achieve reuse? How did you handle the distributed effort? How did the developers you two or whoever else you had working on this? What was their experience working on these?
Dave Clifford: Yeah, that’s a good question. So the Integra portal we built internally, we hired a junior coder and he was able to build that application himself. He got some help from Matt early on in the process, kind of getting pointed in the right direction, but I would say. Because it’s so quick to build and Matt, you know, correct me if I’m wrong here, it’s not like, okay, I have this module that I’m gonna reuse across all of my, those modules are the native components within Zoho.
And so it’s quicker to build something in Zoho almost than it is to prototype, to build a, I used to build clickable prototypes of the stuff that I wanted, you know, to put together. It’s quicker to actually just put the portal together. I think it’s almost like the institution or Matt’s organization gets every time you build something you learn, oh, I would’ve done it.
Maybe this way. If I was to do it again. And so, you know, what we built three years ago looks a little bit different than it does now. Yeah, I would say it’s just so quick to build that you don’t even really necessarily reuse components. Matt. I don’t know what you think about that?
Matt Gallegly: Yeah. I think there are some components we reuse, but I’d say it’s more, it’s more concepts we reuse. Right? Exactly. So if we did, we did Zoho Sign once and, and every time we- it’s never perfect. There’s always some, either improvement that you learn through feedback from the client as they use it.
New features. Right. There’s always new features coming out and it’s like once a week we say, was that always there or is that new? Right. And you go check the release notes. Oh, that’s great. So that’s, it’s continually improved too. So, you know, between that, there’s a pretty, pretty rare instance that you just go copy a block of code exactly. As is.
There’s also nuance to the business process. Right. So even though they’re all onboarding portals, When you’re onboarding a retirement request versus a loan versus a, truck driver’s AR. Yeah, they all need to sign a document, but the documents are off different, different signatories, whatever.
So, you know, all those factors combined. You get the concept you improve them over time. Every time you do it, it’s a little bit better, but every time you do, it’s a little bit different and you got new features as the icing on the cake. Definitely, definitely learn, and build on it.
Dave Clifford: And I think it fits with, my philosophy about custom software is I’d rather go to an existing team and build a piece of software around the way that they do things today than go to a team and say, Hey, here’s a new piece of software that you’ve gotta learn how to do, or you learn how to use.
And by the way, you’re not gonna need 90% of the bells and whistles in here. But they hate that. Right? Typically my experience is, the business teams hate that. What we can do with Creator. And this is why each portal’s a little bit different. Each process is a little bit different is we can go in and say, “Hey, show us your business process.”
Now we’re gonna build something that takes what you do today, and turbocharges it, automates it, makes it quicker and easier. And so that, you know, that’s another really nice aspect of low code is that we can customize around the business unit rather than force them to learn a new way to do something.
Matt Gallegly: Yeah, a lot of that as I think about all the various tools and things, whether it’s portal or internal workflow, but especially internal workflow.
Some of the things that are the simplest are the things that people like the most and that are the biggest return. Right. So I think we’ve learned that sometimes you can over engineer it to some point and to your point of like, you don’t need all these bells and whistles, just keep it to the core process and, do the one thing that they need to do 10,000 times a day.
If you make that really easy. That’s where you get the main benefit. Right. So it’s nice to be able to really zero in on exactly what is the biggest pain point or opportunity for efficiency gain and, and just nail that.
Jason Bloomberg: very good. Well, we have time for one more question. So what is the company’s plans for Creator in the future? Sort of, where do you see this going?
Dave Clifford: Well, we’ve committed to the platform, so it’s, it’s you know, one, I would say. The biggest impact of the PPP experience internally was that the management team and the staff and, and the various business units got bought in, they saw the power of the portal.
And so since then we’ve been integrating it wherever we can. So I would say, you know, we plan to have Zoho Creator touch every one of our businesses and it pretty much does today. And we will continue to build on top of the stuff that we’ve created. And we’re actually unusual in that I think a lot of people start with CRM and then they move toward you know, the, the custom stuff we’re moving towards CRM now as well.
And integrating that with Creator. But you know, our plan is to use Zoho as much as we can. There’s so much there in value that you get for your licensing, that we’re trying to take advantage of, of everything that, that Zoho has to offer.
Matt Gallegly: Yeah. And it’s, and it’s good for your customers too, because you know, oftentimes people that are in retirement, you can, you know, cross sell to, to a loan or vice versa.
And it’s a seamless experience because once they’re into a portal, we’ve got the single sign on across all of them. So, you know, we can provision them and they’ve got. One, one login that they can interact with Tectonic T Bank variety of different business units all through a single source, essentially, which is good for the customer experience as well.
Jason Bloomberg: Yeah. So that’s a, that’s a good point to end on, is that a tool like Zoho Creator, doesn’t just make it easier for the people building the applications. The end result is easier for the end customer to use as well. And that’s, that’s important, right? So it’s a win, win all around.
Dave Clifford: That’s exactly right. Yep.
Jason Bloomberg: Absolutely. Very good. Well, I see we’re at about the 30 minute mark, so let’s wrap up. Thanks again to David Clifford, chief strategy officer at Tectonic Financial, and Matt Gallegly, CEO and lead consultant at Trailguide Digital. Thanks gentlemen.
Dave Clifford: Thanks.
Matt Gallegly: Thanks Jason pleasure.
Jason Bloomberg: And this is Jason Bloomberg with Intellyx and be sure to check out the Zoho website for my latest case study on what the folks at Tectonic and T Bank have done.
And thanks a lot for tuning in.
