By Boomi
In July 2021, WLTH’s CFO threw down a challenge: Bring a product to market by March 2022 — only nine months away. With no technology infrastructure in place, there were even more hurdles to overcome.
“It was certainly a pretty wild ride,” recalls WLTH’s CTO Dave Chapman.
Chapman had plenty of experience in building financial products, having come from Teachers Mutual Bank (TMB), where he was CIO. But this was the company’s first product and there was no playbook.
“We had nothing,” Chapman continues. “We had no tech stack. We had only four people on the team, including myself. We had little money. We didn’t have an architectural framework. We didn’t have anything in place.”
At TMB, Chapman had brought plenty of products to market. And one thing he was sure of was that Boomi would be his integration platform. TMB integrated 40 applications using the Boomi AtomSphere Platform. “It was easier, faster, and cheaper that any integration tool we looked at,” Chapman notes.
Building a Product From End to End
As a fintech startup that launched in 2018, WLTH had no legacy infrastructure to untangle. It was cloud-first from day one. Nevertheless, building its first product meant creating everything that would support that product from scratch. Cloud services, integration services, data services, IT operations services as well as compliance and legal.
To help put all the pieces together, which included designing an enterprise architecture, WLTH engaged Boomi Platinum Partner Atturra, winner of Boomi’s APJ Partner of the year in 2018, 2020, and 2021 and one of Australia’s largest IT services companies. Chapman knew he needed smart people with a visionary mindset to pull this off and that’s just what he got with Atturra.
“Jason Frost and his team from Atturra sat down with us and at first said, ‘Nine months? You’ve got to be kidding.’ But when we started talking about the basic plan and how we could see the components fitting together with an integration layer underneath and Boomi Master Data Hub synchronizing data on the backend, we realized it was doable. Ten years ago? No way. But with tools like Boomi, we could do it.”
Let’s Do It Right the First Time
Because of Chapman’s prior experience — 25 years’ worth — he knew what he didn’t want to do. WLTH was a greenfield, which, if handled intelligently, is IT Nirvana.
“You don’t have a legacy to worry about,” Chapman explains. “You don’t have all this other stuff in your way. Instead, it’s let build this right and do it right from the ground up. And that’s what we did.”
As it became more and more obvious that this product launch was not just doable but an exciting opportunity, it created a buzz that carried the team forward — without hiring a gaggle of data engineers, data architects, and enterprise architects, which WLTH couldn’t afford anyway.
Chapman also found the network he’d developed over the years extremely helpful. For example, he’s a big fan of Snowflake. When he wanted to connect Snowflake into the new product’s application ecosystem, he called people he knew who used Snowflake for an honest assessment of its pros and cons.
“Across the board, when we said, ‘We’ve got a greenfield environment and we’d like to do it right,’ people were willing to help. They really got on board with that.”
Chapman continually emphasized that Boomi’s flexibility allowed them to try different things — to easily plug and unplug services from the core infrastructure without time-consuming work arounds and recoding.
Thanks to Chapman’s teams efforts, powered by Boomi and Atturra, the WLTH platform went live in February 2022, not only making the nine-month deadline but beating it by a month.
To learn more about WLTH’s story, watch the webinar, “Challenging the Status Quo: Transforming FSI with a Pure SaaS Model,” available on demand.