By Richard Higginbotham, Product Manager at Netcall
Amid the rise of challenger banks like Monzo and Resolut, traditional financial services institutions have never been under more pressure to deliver the innovative and personalised service conferred by digital transformation. The banking sector could stand to gain $1 trillion a year from artificial intelligence and machine learning alone. However, many institutions struggle with how to achieve results. Low-code development not only offers an accessible conduit to digital transformation, but it also comes with a host of other benefits.
Read on to learn about some of the top benefits financial services gain from low-code:
- Faster in-house development
Through a low-code application platform designed for business users, financial services organisations can develop full-stack applications three to 10 times faster than with standard development. Low-code makes it possible for business users to develop beyond core function with oversight from IT, increasing developer capability and expediting app development from months to just days in some cases.
This enables businesses to accelerate digital initiatives despite acute shortages of skilled developers. The ease of making changes to low-code applications and the ability to rapidly develop solutions creates the organisational resilience and agility the financial sector needs for long-term success.
Low-code applications combine well with robotic process automation, making integration possible even where legacy applications have proved challenging. This unlocks greater opportunities for automation at scale and improves customer experience, leading to greater returns and efficiencies.
- Improved experiences for customers and employees
Our use of technology is rapidly evolving, with the emerging generation of consumers reshaping expectations around digital access to products and services. In this environment, financial services organisations can’t afford to fall short of demands for digital.
Low-code applications provide the capability to build, extend and adapt digital services for consumers. For example, they can provide proactive notifications that keep customers abreast of account activities and give them the capability to manage their accounts in real-time. Customer engagement is improved as financial institutions interact with customers within the channel of their choice, without disrupting the customer journey.
Legacy systems and technology, on the other hand, often struggle to keep pace to support evolving products and services. Employees take the strain as they bridge the gap between applications with manual and spreadsheet-based processes.
However, the intelligent automation capabilities of low-code development and robotic process automation ease this burden on employees and drastically reduce the inevitable errors that occur when employees do repetitive and monotonous tasks, like data entry.
Manual paper-based processes are moved online, giving thousands of hours back to employees. Human-in-the-loop features enable employees to intervene to ensure automations are producing intended outcomes and that governance is maintained. Applications can be built to accommodate robust compliance and security measures, protecting consumers and employees.
Further, by easing the load on employees, they are able to be more creative, offer better customer support, and devote more time to value-adding tasks.
- Innovative solutions
Faster development through low-code also facilitates innovation because the speed, cost-effectiveness and ease of it allow for repeated iterations. This means businesses can trial new automations and make immediate adjustments to accommodate rapid changes and unstable market conditions.
Low-code provides business users within financial services the ability to contribute to their organisation’s digital transformation. This is advantageous as business users have a different perspective than IT teams. They’re involved in the day-to-day running of things, so they’re going to be well-positioned to suggest the processes that would most benefit from being reimagined through low-code.
Low-code development allows these digital solutions to be tested and tweaked until they are optimised. Even once they have been deployed, the ease of making adjustments encourages innovations, allowing applications to be continually amended to foster more productivity.
Low-code applications reflect the imagination and creativity of employees. If they can imagine a solution, they can create it – and the right low-code application platform gives them the resources they need for this.
- Easy integration with existing systems and new ones that emerge
When it comes to digital transformation, many financial services organisations struggle with their legacy systems. Extending, adapting or changing the function of legacy technology can be expensive, time-consuming and fraught with risk. Low-code’s ability to work around this issue has made it popular within the sector.
Low-code applications and robotic process automation provide the capability to create new functions and applications that integrate, unify and extend legacy systems. Most significantly, this can be achieved without making changes to the underlying system. With this approach, data silos are broken down, creating a single view of processes and single point of access to data, which enable seamless customer and user journeys. This is all accomplished faster, more efficiently and without risk, presenting huge opportunities for financial services institutions.
- Actionable data insights
By eliminating data silos through low-code, employees have access to the right information when they need it. They have a comprehensive view of a client’s contextual information and previous interactions with the organisation.
When a low-code application platform with artificial intelligence and machine learning features is adopted, decision making capabilities are unearthed, producing rich insights that inform more strategic decision making, drive productivity, save costs and generate growth.
An approach to digital transformation that incorporates low-code development platforms and robotic process automation will increase productivity, reduce expenses and generate operational efficiency to help financial services organisations achieve excellence. Agile, iterative development capabilities expand their ability to rapidly streamline and smoothen customer and user experiences.
The businesses that commit to this approach are going to be best positioned for fast returns on investment and long-term competitiveness. For those who have yet to start, it presents an opportunity to start small and scale fast. For others who are further along in their transformation journey, it provides the opportunity to accelerate their efforts and avoid costly missteps thanks to inherent agility. Intelligent automation using an AI-powered low-code and robotic process automation platform is going to help you get to where you need to be on your digital transformation journey faster.
