Client Brief: ABN AMRO Mortgage

About ABN AMRO Mortgage

ABN AMRO Mortgage is part of ABN AMRO Mortgage Group, Inc., one of the nation's leading home lenders. ABN AMRO Mortgage Group, Inc. specializes in all aspects of mortgage lending, from origination to closing and servicing, providing our customers the unique advantage of staying with the same company throughout the life of the loan. ABN AMRO Mortgage Group, Inc. is an indirect subsidiary of ABN AMRO Bank N.V., one of the world's largest banks with total assets of EUR 742.9 billion and a presence in more than 3,400 locations in over 60 countries and territories. ABN AMRO is organized into three autonomous strategic business units, responsible for managing wholesale clients, consumer and commercial clients, private clients and asset management.

Why Exadel

"What I like about companies like Exadel is that they acknowledge the way my company works," said Michael Gallagher, Global Manager of Enterprise Architecture, ABN AMRO. "I don't spend a lot of time out on SourceForge pulling things down and figuring out how best to add them into our online banking. We're structured to start by talking to our bankers to figure out what their needs are, to then look in our tools suites and figure what we've already got to solve their problems, and finally to talk to vendors about what new offerings they have."

Business Challenge

In 1999, ABN AMRO Mortgage was planning to launch a consumer facing online mortgage system. It was an aggressive vision. Beyond providing online access to ABN AMRO'S array of home lending products, the application was slated to allow consumers to apply for a new mortgage, refinance their homes and access real-time information on current lending rates.
Global Manager of Enterprise Architecture Michael Gallagher knew that the best tools and technologies for developing the application could be found in the open source community.
However, without an in-house expert on every open source technology, Gallagher knew he needed the guidance of a company that understood how to integrate and support these technologies with ABN AMRO's existing infrastructure.
"I liked the idea of creating an open environment where everyone with a strong enough opinion can contribute their time and creativity to build better tools," said Gallagher. "I didn't like the idea of paying someone to sit down and pull together all the individual plug-ins we need for a standard development tool. I wanted someone else to pull together their version of the best tools, package them up nicely so that they'll run in my environment, then deliver them to me."

Business Solution

Gallagher chose to bring in Exadel, because of the company's reputation for delivering products ahead of web application development trends and for understanding how to effectively deploy open source software in a mission-critical enterprise environment.
To develop the Mortgage.com application, ABN AMRO relied on the Eclipse-based Exadel Studio Pro product. This offering uses the Eclipse platform to leverage Struts, JavaServer Faces, Hibernate, Spring and other open-source technologies for business solutions. ABN AMRO also tapped Exadel's used professional consulting services (Development Boost).

Business Results

Exadel helped ABN AMRO build Mortgage.com on budget and on time. The application is now in production and widely used by thousands of ABN AMRO customers.
ABN AMRO was pleased with the overall results, and decided to use Exadel to help with a number of additional internal and back office applications.