Appian has announced Helia (formerly Genworth) as an Asian-Pacific Innovation Award winner at the 2023 Appian Innovation Awards. The award recognises an individual or team whose use of Appian is disrupting their market, serving as a catalyst for a new standard in how work is done.

As one of Australia's leading Lenders Mortgage Insurance (LMI) providers for the residential market, Helia has been recognised for its innovation in using the Appian Platform across multiple departments to automate processes and transform operations into an interconnected workplace. Using Appian, Helia automated its claims management workflows and reduced the processing time from two days to less than 10 minutes, improving their lender customer experience.

As part of its digital transformation journey, Helia identified that a low-code platform could deliver organisational agility and leverage the investment the company had already made in APIs, cloud, and artificial intelligence. With the Appian Platform, Helia is positioned to deliver apps faster without hand-coding or the need for extra resources, according to the company.

Jeremy Francis, COO of Helia, says, "We chose Appian because it allowed us to bypass full-stack developers and build new digital systems that could be modified easily and cost-effectively by Helia's developers."

Helia previously released new code once a month, but with Appian, the organisation can now deploy code several times in a single week.

Francis says, "We are continually transforming while still operating our business - servicing our customers and internal people at the same time. Importantly, the platform allows us to release regular small deployments that don't impact our lender customers."

"Our team is able to create 12 times as many applications as before using the Appian Platform - and that's without needing the support of additional resources. Appian has truly democratised application development, enabling our people to take on projects that continue adding to their technical skillset."

The Appian Platform has also enabled Helia's underwriters to have more say in the development process, resulting in an optimised underwriting application that reduces data entry by 10% and improves system-based decisioning. This means more qualified underwriters can instead focus on complex cases, saving time and resources, the company states.

Francis says, "The success of the underwriting optimisation application has inspired other departments to actively engage with low-code process automation technology, leading to a billing solution on the Appian Platform which has reduced manual efforts in finance by 18 hours per lender customer, per month."

By leveraging the Appian Platform, Helia's team was able to reimagine their work processes, inspiring a forward-thinking culture that fosters innovation, the company states. The platform has motivated the entire team to bridge the gap between the business and tech teams.

Luke Thomas, Area Vice President Asia Pacific at Appian, comments, "We are thrilled to see the success Helia has achieved with Appian in such a short time. The company's commitment to upskilling its teams and creating a growth mindset culture has been truly impressive.

"We are proud to have played a role in Helia's journey by providing our Appian Education Services to help develop retraining plans for their people. It's a testament to their hard work and dedication that Helia now has operations, finance, risk, and sales teams all benefiting from Appian."