Bringing Digital Transformation to Financial Institutions

Giving Customers a Competitive Advantage

In the same way that CircleCI creates a competitive advantage for engineering teams by helping them be more productive and output higher-quality code, nCino’s Bank Operating System helps financial institutions gain a competitive edge. nCino builds its application on top of Salesforce, which many bankers already use for their customer relationship management.

“We make software to help automate the lending processes and beyond at financial institutions,” says Brian Triplett, Director of Release Management at nCino.

“Historically, many banks and credit unions have very manual processes for originating loans. Bankers would evaluate loans, underwrite loans, close the loans, and so on. You can think of this as a corollary to the DevOps problem: information is in a lot of different places and needs to be consolidated. I’ve even heard horror stories of having a loan file that was actually a manila folder with paper in it in someone’s drawer. Lots of people are involved but they’re not necessarily looking at the same records.”

With nCino, banks and credit unions now have a system that automates the loan process of collecting customer information, evaluating risk, generating documentation, and so on. This allows them to close more loans, faster, and with less cost.

“Our goal is to increase revenue for banks by giving them better front and back office systems,” says Triplett. “If someone comes to a bank and asks for a loan, and they get an answer in hours or days, where the bank down the street takes months: that’s a real differentiator.”

“CircleCI has an incredibly low barrier to get started, but grows with you as your needs get more complex.”

Brian Triplett
Director of Release Management at nCino

The Challenge Prior to CircleCI

“As nCino started to grow, we realized that without the right tooling and processes, technology scaling would would be prohibitively expensive, and could even hamper the growth of our business,” says Triplett.

“Our QA team was overburdened, and the whole build and testing process was very manual. QA engineers would have to tag commits in GitHub, and then go into JIRA to connect tickets with those builds, and then log into a specific Salesforce environment to click some buttons to make everything run. It was a very manual process, and there were lots of opportunities for someone to miss a step. The whole thing took at least an hour. We couldn’t hire enough QA folks to make this process work for us.”

“As our product got bigger and more complicated, we knew we couldn’t have a manual QA team building the software, testing the software, and regression testing the software. We knew we needed ways to automate the whole process. We started to see QA folks staying late as releases approached, and it wasn’t a valuable use of their time.”

“One of the core philosophies our engineering leadership team has is to enable us to be fast. We want to use fast solutions to operate our business, and having a cloud-based CI solution provides that.”

The Solution

“CircleCI is a developer’s CI tool,” says nCino’s Director of Release Management, Brian Triplett. “Having your build definitions, build script, and YAML file in source control makes it so that it’s really easy for developers to get started. There isn’t a system out there that’s been tinkered with by somebody and configured by somebody else, where no one really knows how anything works because the master architect set it up a year ago.”

Triplett also says that the transparency and flexibility of CircleCI is an asset to nCino. “It was really easy to set up the initial YAML file and get started. Over time, it’s clear that we have a ton of flexibility to chain together everything we want in our build process. We’re moving toward continuous delivery, which is ultimately where we want to go.”

nCino also appreciates CircleCI’s GitHub integration. “Having links to the build on CircleCI in GitHub is key to making all information accessible from one hub.”

Triplett has been exploring how to connect developer tools to Salesforce so that stakeholders across sales, customer support, marketing, and other teams can easily get status updates that are important to their business goals. “Our development work impacts everyone across the organization, so creating visibility into how new releases are tracking, the statuses of different services, and so on, is one of our business goals.”

About nCino

nCino is the worldwide leader in cloud banking. With its Bank Operating System, built on the Salesforce platform, financial institutions can deliver the speed and digital experience that customers expect, backed by the quality and transparency that bankers need.