With a name inspired by the sun, Helia has been a beacon of innovation in Australia’s Lenders Mortgage Insurance (LMI) industry since 1965. As Australia’s first LMI provider, Helia creates brighter outcomes for people by helping home buyers enter the property market sooner, by not having to wait to save the traditional 20% deposit. Helia provides LMI to banks and non-bank mortgage originators, so these lenders can in turn help more aspiring home buyers realise their property dreams sooner.
Enhancing Helia’s customer experience
Helia’s commitment to delivering a seamless, future-fit customer experience led them on a two-year agile transformation journey. Partnering with Workato, Helia harnessed the power of orchestration to unlock efficiency gains, free up critical resources, and innovate with an AI-first tech strategy that set them apart in the industry. This is their story.
Reimagining integration
Helia’s Digital Solutions Director, Neil Rodgers, saw an opportunity to introduce an iPaaS that could empower Helia to reimagine their integration layer, which powers their services and databases.
His vision was to have applications run themselves, without the need for production support, so that his team could work on new features instead of having to tinker with the user interface and business processes layers. Neil also wanted to reduce the need for specialised resources, introducing low code solutions so that anyone could develop or run the applications. This would expand the pool of resources available at any given time.
An integration layer that any squad member could utilise would help take Neil’s team to the next level. Such squads included application developers, data engineers, AI engineers and data scientists, as well as cloud infrastructure engineers. A cohesive integration strategy that fuses automation and AI (i.e. enterprise orchestration), would provide a foundation for their approach to federate everything to ensure shared ownership, whereby everyone champions the use of a range of tools to solve business problems.
“Helia does not believe in CV-driven development, which would restrict us to building solutions based on the technology familiar to the developer assigned. Instead, the assigned developer must be able to use the right technology for the solution. Workato’s low/no code iPaaS capabilities fits perfectly with this philosophy.”
Neil Rodgers, Digital Solutions Director, Helia
Ultimately, Neil and his team are guided by their department’s Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework which sits within Helia’s wider strategic roadmap. Orchestration was able to support in delivering on these OKRs, which include:
- Creating an industry-best onboarding experience for customers
- Fighting cybercrime with strong defenses and limited targets
- Amplifying technology and data capabilities.
Workato in action
Neil admits that he was not sure if Workato was the right platform for Helia, at least not until he saw Workato in action at Automate 2023. Soon, one of his Digital Solutions squads put Workato to the test on an ambitious proof of concept, which performed beyond expectations.
“Workato supported one of our squads to successfully deliver a challenging proof of concept. From there we progressed very quickly – it was a seamless process to contract and onboard.”
Neil Rodgers, Digital Solutions Director, Helia
Since then, several other teams across Helia have come onboard to reimagine their workflows using Workato, including Helia’s HR, Service Desk and soon Finance.
Taking customer onboarding to the next level
When asked about the orchestration projects with Workato that Helia is most proud of, Neil highlights a game-changing project that would enable Helia to seamlessly onboard new customers in just a matter of days. Helia has dedicated squads focusing on ways to improve their end-to-end customer onboarding journey to remove unnecessary friction. Once Workato was onboarded, a customer integration squad experimented with Workato and AI to further enhance the experience and automate majority of the previously time-consuming data mapping work, such as converting digital information of various formats (e.g. XML and JSON) into language that is compliant with the LIXI 2.0 – an industry standard on data messaging.
Streamlined invoice generation and approval
Neil also called out their invoice automation project as a great example of AI and Automation as well as the collaborative approach between Workato and Helia. This project streamlines invoice generation and approval workflows so that people are ‘reviewers and approvers’ instead of completing tedious low value data entry activities. The idea was born during a hackathon with Workato, when one of Helia’s developers stumbled across a template recipe they could adapt from Workato’s extensive community library.
Here’s how it works:
Brighter outcomes
Here’s what Helia achieved with Workato –
- Faster customer onboarding: Customers onboarded in days, significantly enhancing the efficiency of this process.
- Efficiency gains from optimising tools: Helia retired outdated tools such as one they were using for batch scheduling, since Workato could achieve the same outcome more efficiently. Even implementing a single Workato connector saved 35% more time.
- Citizen development to reduce demands on developers’ time: In line with Helia’s goal to empower everyone to develop, Workato freed up time and expanded its available pool of resources by 4 times, to include citizen developers.
“Workato was pivotal in helping us enhance our customer experience offering. They moved quickly, deployed quickly, listened to Helia at every step of the way, and strived for perfection. The Workato team actively sought out product feedback, demonstrating exceptional customer-centricity in building new functionalities we needed.”
Neil Rodgers, Digital Solutions Director, Helia
Shaping the future
Looking to the future, Neil and his team are keen to reuse the robust architectural patterns they have built using Workato to supercharge several other end-to-end workflows. One example is to infuse AI-powered integrations into Helia’s email channel to streamline and optimise the processing of support requests. With Workato supporting such innovations by their dynamic team, Helia can continue delivering industry-leading solutions and experiences for their customers.
Neil Rodgers, Digital Solutions Director, Helia (rightmost) speaks on a panel at Automate Sydney 2024, on “The Rise of Democratised Innovation and Making Automation a Team Sport Through Enterprise Orchestration”. Joining him are his peers from Village Roadshow, Canva and Novatti Group, with Workato’s CIO Carter Busse moderating (leftmost).
