MuleSoft, a Salesforce company, is thrilled to announce that, for the second year in a row, we have been named the 29th most innovative company in a list of the top 100 companies in Australia. At MuleSoft, we have a culture of making it awesome, and innovation is core to the work that we do. MuleSoft has enabled innovative practices for so many of our customers, including companies like Tic:Toc––an automated home loan service in Australia. We started about 9 years ago as a 24-person company, and a strong culture of innovation has been woven into our DNA since then.
The Australian Financial Review award is granted based on a company’s innovative ideas, how well those ideas address the problems they are trying to solve, and how evident the impact of their innovations is so far. After surveying 60 MuleSoft employees in Australia, AFR was impressed by how MuleSoft fosters innovation internally with a strategy and company culture that reward original thought. AFR also acknowledge how MuleSoft has transformed business outcomes with innovative solutions for so many of its customers, including Tic:Toc.
MuleSoft is constantly brainstorming new ideas for our product, and the team here is always on our toes looking out for the next original idea. Our innovative culture is not exclusive to specific teams or offices, but is rather a mindset that extends across the entire company. It’s a culture that our employees and customers really appreciate.
Internal innovation: Why MuleSoft is an innovative company
MuleSoft stood out in a number of categories that the AFR team was looking for. Internally, we have large pool of funding that is available for teams to use to pursue innovations outside of “business as usual.” This is just one example of how innovation is reinforced across the company, regardless of team or status quo. Our customers are also directly involved in our conversations about our organization’s vision, strategy for innovation, idea generation, and how we meet the needs of various industries. On an external level, customers are key to how we stress innovation in the market.
The AFR award also acknowledged how MuleSoft’s innovation efforts are formally measured. We’re not just talking the talk – we’re actually keeping track of our innovation with metrics in the following areas:
- Innovative ideas proposed
- Number of experiments run
- Financial metrics such as ROI from innovations
- Organizational culture
- Formal rewards program for innovation
In addition to MuleSoft’s innovation strategies, we also ensure that our company culture breeds a sense of innovation in the workplace. In order to foster a creative spirit around our technology, we host two hackathons a year, one in Buenos Aires and one in San Francisco.
We hosted one of our 2-day hackathons at MeetUp, with over 1,000 Muleys attending from all around the globe. With our bottom-up initiatives to foster innovation, we set the tone for a culture of creativity.
Customer innovation: Tic:Toc instant home loan transformation
Tic:Toc, a MuleSoft customer in Australia, exemplifies the innovative nature of so many MuleSoft clients. In 2015, Tic:Toc decided to address the arduous process of applying for a home loan, noticing that Australians typically spend hours, days, even weeks of their lives confused and consumed by such a significant decision. Clients are often forced to fill out lengthy forms, gather financial details from a range of sources, resubmit the same information, conduct countless in-person meetings, and wait long periods for approval. The startup noticed that this causes frustration and confusion around one of the most important financial decisions. Since 2015, Tic:Toc has offered services which shorten the application process from 22 days to 22 minutes.
Tic:Toc spent three years designing and building a platform to remove inefficiencies in the home icon approval and fulfillment process. Its technology suite includes 21 different technology components, both proprietary (built in-house) and adapted (“off-the-shelf”) technologies. Tic:Toc’s platform is orchestrated holistically via MuleSoft, and creates an intelligent decision system that tailors and assesses loan applications in real-time.
In October 2017, Tic:Toc selected MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, which offers a complete set of out-of-the-box assets that helped Tic:Toc quickly create a lightweight platform for its fully automated online home loan application system. With MuleSoft, Tic:Toc created a unique service that drastically reduces the time needed to apply and be approved for a home loan––radically changing the game in the financial services space. After just six months of operation, Tic:Toc has seen more than $515 million worth of home loan applications fully submitted.
Tic:Toc’s CEO, Anthony Baum is thrilled about the success MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform enabled for the company:“By taking an API-led approach to connecting the systems required to evaluate loan applicants, we’ve eliminated the manual submission process and radically changed the game in the financial services space,” he said.
Tic:Toc plans on expanding their business into new markets by offering this service to a broader range of third-party partners, which is easily enabled by MuleSoft. Since the company has already developed reusable building blocks, all they need to do is flip the switch to enable others to consume that same service.
Outside of Australia, our customers are innovating in incredible ways as well. With MuleSoft, the University of South Florida is helping students embrace an online approach to education, and ASICS is building a global eCommerce platform 2.5x faster with MuleSoft’s connectivity solutions. Our innovative customers are only just getting started.
We’re very thankful to AFR for recognizing all of MuleSoft’s success in Australia, and we can’t wait to see how our creative approach pushes us to new heights in the future. One of Salesforce’s core values is innovation, so if you’re interested in working for a company that’s thinking in original ways with the best people around, now is the time to join us. Check out our open positions in Australia or visit our Careers site.
