Fast-growing West Australian mutual P&N Bank has shown how smaller banks can catch up to the big players by thoughtful use of relatively low-cost technologies to link customer data across all applications.The P&N bank currently has over 93,000 members, with its growth in part due to the new platform and a new lending product approach, according to Kerrie Nayler, P&N communications manager.The bank is championing a newly installed version of Dell's Boomi integration platform-as-a-service, a process which P&N's chief information officer Erik Fenna said was "faster than expected, cheaper than we expected, and delivered more benefits than we expected", although he declined to attach any direct numbers to these claims.These new lending products and internal improvements resulted in P&N becoming the fastest growing mutual in FY 2016 - in terms of home lending - with "double digit lending growth of 20-odd per cent" that year, as well as being Roy Morgan's top rated bank for customer satisfaction in recent months, said Naylor."We have a set of business requirements that rely on the exchange of data between several systems, and so we needed an integration solution to make the management of those apps more straightforward," Fenna said."We didn't have any integration platform at P&N at all, prior to [installation of] Boomi."Our systems were operating independently of each other, although and there was a certain amount of integration: lending was connected to core banking, but that was about it. Everything else was manually done - either by rekeying or cutting and pasting, or uploading a file manually.""We wanted to get to a point where a lot of the systems that we used on a day to day basis were sending and receiving messages in a co-ordinated fashion - with a few classic examples being: electronic lodgement from mortgage brokers, CRM and lead management.Fenna was looking for a system a that gave best value for money, and followed the advice of the bank's customer relationship management consultant - "we did a proof of concept, had the [test version] up and running in 24 hours and we went from there."The Boomi software has also transformed P&N Bank's broker network, used by around 1,000 partners, from a single data feed into a multi-data feed while maintaining the same formats and protocols, with a gateway protecting private information shared between the parties.