Banking Digital - Our Award-Winning Solution from Fly toward Amplify with AEM Forms & Adobe Sign

We are in the Corona Lockdown - many employees are sitting at home in their home offices. Nevertheless, we want to ensure smooth collaboration with our colleagues. As customers, we also want to be able to connect with our financial institutions and sign contracts without having to enter our bank.

In our digital age, how can we do that using Adobe Sign and AEM Forms? This was the question our team at eggs unimedia received as part of Adobe's "Fly towards Amplify" program and our answer was. "Challenge accepted".

The Amplify program from Adobe

Adobe is a U.S. software or platform provider. Platform providers differ from industry solution providers in one key respect:

Platform vendors take a generic approach, meaning that a wide variety of solutions can be built on top of the platform. Providers of industry solutions offer one or more specific solutions for a particular use case. The respective advantages are obvious: A generic platform can be used to develop and map a wide variety of application scenarios from the most diverse areas (e.g. HR, sales, purchasing). The industry solution, on the other hand, is already "finished", but is difficult to extend.

As part of the Adobe Amplify program, partners create industry-specific solutions using Adobe technologies. These solutions are scrutinized, certified, and marketed by Adobe. "Fly toward Amplify" focused on AEM Forms and Adobe Sign technologies.

The program started in mid-July 2020 and ran until November 2020. A total of 17 teams participated worldwide, with eggs unimedia being the only participant from the European region.

How did we proceed?

We approached the program like a project for a new client. In the first step, we put together a team of developers and business eggspert*innen. There was a core team as well as colleagues who were available to advise on the project. I myself took on the role of project manager and "Scrum" master. Scrum is in quotation marks because in this case we decided to use Kanban as a method.

Normally, our customers approach us with their questions. In this case, we as a team did the requirements workshop with ourselves and defined a use case. We decided to base our use case in the banking and insurance industry. Through years of working with customers in these industries, we know the issues customers face and were able to incorporate many of them into the use case.

With personas and our own bank, we breathed more life into our use case.

Our Use Case
Our goal with the use case was to map the complete flow of a form in a bank or insurance company. From form creation and approval to application acceptance. We focused on a few key points. To make the process more descriptive, we decided to use an application form for opening a securities account at a bank.
 

• Creation of an adaptive form in AEM Forms including a review process by e.g. a supervisor
• Provision of the form in the Forms Portal (part of AEM Forms)
• Calling up of the personalized form via a banner by an interested party

• Fill in, digitally sign and send the form
  

• Processing of the form in the bank via a defined workflow

We also developed a user journey, which was repeatedly adapted and specified during the course of the project until we arrived at this flow.

From all the ideas, we defined the first user stories together in the project team. These were formulated by our product owner Julian Manzel and recorded and prioritized in a Kanban project in Jira.

What happened next?
The development work and refinement of the concept took place over the next few weeks. Our team was in daily communication in the Daily Standup Meeting. We used this daily virtual meeting to review the already developed components. Technical obstacles were discussed, and a daily plan for further action was developed. This way, everyone on the project team was always up to date, and everyone pulled together to deliver a great solution.

Adobe kept us on track with weekly emails and tasks, so we were able to stay on schedule.

At the end of the development phase, we recorded a technical demo and a pitch to a client. We submitted these two videos, along with use case and customer journey documents, as official competition documents to Adobe.

The customer pitch was also held live in front of an Adobe jury. There was a Q&A session and initial feedback - just like in real life.

AEM Forum 2020

The final result was presented by my colleague Franziska Schelter and my colleagues Martin Brösamle, Alexander Lotz and Julian Manzel in their talk at our 7th AEM Forms Forum in October 2020. At this point, the most exciting moment for our team was still to come. The award ceremony in the "Fly Towards Amplify" program.

The tension rises

The virtual closing of the "Fly towards Amplify" program took place on November 4. All participating teams were invited to find out who will receive the coveted prizes. Of course, no one missed this exciting moment. In total, five categories were awarded. Our eggs unimedia solution Banking.digital received the Fly towards Amplify Award for Technical Readiness. Our entire team is very proud of this award. Directly after the award ceremony, there was therefore a spontaneous virtual victory celebration.

Interested parties can get to know the solution in the following Youtube video: Banking Digital Präsentation und Live-Demo  

Now have fun watching the videos. If you are interested in the Banking.digital solution, please contact us.