Terafina

The Test

  • Accelerated Terafina time to market by 40% with CodeScience’s agile development process and Salesforce expertise
  • Successfully passed security review to secure listing on AppExchange
  • Terafina technical staff reduced delivery time with upfront design reviews from CodeScience
  • Initial product from CodeScience helped Terafina’s banking customers increase sales conversion rates twofold versus competing platforms

From the first meeting, I knew CodeScience would be an ideal resource to our team, because the start-up mentality is also in CodeScience’s DNA.”

Boris Grinshpun, VP Sales & Marketing/Co-Founder, Terafina

The Background: About Terafina

Terafina provides next-generation, cloud-based sales solutions for financial institutions. The company was founded by industry experts with strategic and operational management experience in Digital Banking and Omni-Channel Sales.

Terafina is built on best practices developed at the largest banks. Its solutions empower a financial institution’s customers and employees to interact seamlessly at all phases and stages of the sales cycle, regardless of product, channel, or digital device. Terafina is committed to continuously innovate through the adoption of new technology

The Test

When you build a business on Force.com — to empower financial institutions to innovate, impress “new age” customers, and continue to grow organically, you need to be both agile and deeply skilled in banking. Terafina is both. With extensive experience acquired from working at the big six US banks (which generated a combined $75.8 billion in 2013!), Terafina’s leadership had often been frustrated by siloed sales and marketing processes between banking groups like mortgage, credit, and deposits. In fact, according to a recent McKinsey Consulting report, 85% of banking customers abandon the purchase process for a new product— yielding a successful transaction rate of just 15%.

Terafina’s vision is to end consumer frustration and improve sales performance of financial institutions by unifying the traditional data silos with the industry’s first “Omni-Channel” sales solution.

“Terafina’s mission is to do more for both customers and bank employees. We want to create wonderful experiences and provide innovation that drives sales for financial organizations by providing a single, comprehensive, and intelligent view into what their end-users want,” said Boris Grinshpun, Terafina VP Sales & Marketing/Co-Founder.

After researching different options to build its app, Terafina selected the Force.com platform.

When we decided how we wanted to build our product, leveraging the proven security and scalability of Force.com meant we could get to market faster with our product. This is because the Force.com platform allows us to achieve our goals with two to three times less technical staff than we would have needed if we did everything ourselves,” continued Grinshpun. “While this was obviously a tremendous savings for us and our investors, it did introduce a new challenge because we quickly realized we needed deeper Force.com expertise than what we had in-house.”

“Culturally, Terafina is radically different from other Fintech Solutions. We’re very entrepreneurial and more like a start-up, because we go quickly from idea to execution,” added Grinshpun. “From the first meeting I had with Mike in his living room, I knew CodeScience would be an ideal resource to our team, because the start-up mentality is also in CodeScience’s DNA. The alternative would have been some slow, rigid project with a big expensive consulting firm … no thanks.”

The Science

The initial Terafina product successfully delivered the first Omni-Channel Sales Solution for financial institutions. It provides them with a comprehensive view into customer behavior across multiple channels including brick-and-mortar branches, call centers, online, and mobile, to monitor how customers buy and use products. Additionally, the product’s logic engine integrates all this data and presents bank representatives on Terafina with predictive data surrounding potential up-sell and cross-sell customer opportunities.

Because we worked with CodeScience architects early in our engagement, we were able to bulletproof what our clients want versus what the Force.com platform can actually deliver,” said Grinshpun. “This was huge because we scoped everything accurately and early in development as we worked together as a single team, and constantly passed code back and forth with CodeScience to build our app.”

Terafina also knew it needed a highly responsive design that ensured the application would render properly on the array of web-enabled phones, tablets, and computers that customers use to access banking products. CodeScience’s responsive design expertise ensured the Terafina app would intelligently optimize how it rendered based on the characteristics of any device that accessed it.

“For our application architecture, we absolutely needed our code-base to support multiple organizations, including different security protocols, because there are so many differences in terms of how banks and credit unions operate due to strict regulations,” commented Grinshpun.

“Achieving that dictated that we write code in a way that our internal team hadn’t done before— CodeScience was with us all the way during this complex process, defining data models, business rules, security protocols, and integration points with third-party services like Docusign and Google.”

CodeScience architects and engineers worked closely with Terafina’s development team to share their best practices for coding on the Force.com platform for controllers, web services, classes, triggers, and bulk data processing to make the app scalable. CodeScience also leveraged its extensive experience with the Security Review process to ensure Terafina would be listed on the AppExchange for greater exposure and sales.

It’s no secret that passing the security review with Salesforce.com is hard — but it’s supposed to be hard, because this process is integral to building a trusted ecosystem which ultimately makes every app on the AppExchange more valuable,” said Hemang Patel, CodeScience’s lead architect on Terafina’s project. “Because Terafina is a financial app, security needed to be extraordinarily tight, so we did some creative things to ensure we passed the security review, such as building a time-out security token which triggers a logout countdown timer if a customer is inactive too long.”

The Results

The McKinsey Consulting study stated that online banking customers average only a 15% success rate for completing new purchases. The Terafina platform is delivering a success rate of more than 30% for new product purchases. This twofold increase in sales volume will directly translate to new revenue and expanded market share for banks that choose Terafina. Moreover, Terafina’s built-in cross-sell/up-sell engine will help banks bundle products or add new sales offers to end-customers.

“Time to market was a primary success factor for us. Working with CodeScience allowed us to bring a product to market 40% faster than we would have been able to if we tried to do all our APEX-based Force.com development and security reviews ourselves,” said Grinshpun. “When we combine that with the 2-3x labor cost savings from using the Force.com platform, we know we stayed true to our start-up mentality while building a killer product.”

From architecture to deployment, CodeScience also used its experience to help Terafina build a cost-efficient license strategy for multiple Salesforce.com products. Because Sales Cloud and Service Cloud have varying license prices, CodeScience created modules and separated application functionality to allow Terafina to effectively manage its Salesforce investments.

“The development team at Terafina was awesome when it came to learning the ins and outs of Force.com — from when we started, we’ve seen the volume of questions from customers drop from a few a day, to a few a week, to a few a month,” added Patel at CodeScience. “When they call now, it’s more likely that we’ll talk about going to a Giants game than a support question.”

“One of the most unique things about CodeScience is how their identity mapped to our vision,” concluded Grinshpun from Terafina. “Terafina is a radically different product, and CodeScience really worked with us as partners in the creative process; this is something which we’ve never seen vendors do before. We never had a script in terms of how we would work together, because we simply never needed one.”

Working with CodeScience allowed us to bring a product to market 40% faster than we would have been able to if we tried to do all our APEX-based Force.com development and security reviews ourselves.”

Boris Grinshpun, VP Sales & Marketing/Co-Founder, Terafina

Terafina App Functionality Highlights

Built on the Force.com platform in less than 8 months, the first iteration of Terafina’s application included the following:

  • First ever “Omni-Channel” sales solution app for banking
  • Responsive design to ensure mobile application performance
  • Intelligent cross-sell engine for customers to increase revenue
  • Fully customizable admin portal for multi-organizational deployments
  • Integration with Docusign, Google & Verification Engines
  • Time-out security tokens to prevent “snooping” breaches for customers
  • Google analytics tags on all pages to track real-time organizational performance
  • Highly secure and configurable multi- organization application architecture

Whether you’re a long time partner or just now evaluating the Salesforce ecosystem, we would love the opportunity to help you build for success.