Srikanth
While no-code platforms have existed over a decade ago, their use by organisations has picked up steam only in the last few years. Given the advantage of speed, agility and cost optimisation in development and maintenance over traditional framework-based development, CIOs are now increasingly using the no-code approach to development.
Therefore, the use of no-code platforms to meet the typical digital transformation goals for banking and financial institutions is well understood and widespread now. No-code platforms are proving their mettle in being able to quickly and easily automate processes such as customer onboarding, account maintenance, loan origination and management, customer servicing, payments, and descriptive analytics and business MIS management.
With the basics of the digital transformation journey underway, CIOs now need to look at what’s next in the no-code space. No-code platform development is expected to free up almost 60% of the IT budget which was traditionally spent in just managing the status quo on the current legacy technology and systems.
As CIOs look towards the future, adoption of no-code platforms as a strategically important initiative will play a key role in achieving the digital transformation goals for organisations. According to Gartner, it is estimated that in 3-5 years, more than 65% of the digitization and tech enablement for organisations will be performed in-house with the help of no-code platforms. Micro SaaS options i.e. the ability to build multiple and unlimited applications and embed them as part of the digital transformation journey, velocity of the development i.e., the speed at which new apps and tech enablement is introduced to the business scenarios and optimisation of cost i.e., the cost to develop and maintain new applications are going to be important pillars of the no-code strategy for CIOs.
Keeping this in mind, here are some of the key things to look out for in the no-code platforms:
Build apps with speech and imagination:
Application development on no-code platforms today is undertaken by using a visual layer to interact with the coding layer. With the advent of OpenAI and GPT-3, the visual layer will now be replaced by a speech layer giving enterprises the ability to build apps simply by talking or explaining the requirements to the machine. With natural language processing, technical experience or knowledge of even the visual layer of the platform will no longer be a barrier to meeting automation and digital transformation needs.
Consolidation of the technical stack and move towards micro-SaaS products
The rush to automate quickly in the last era led organisations to consume a lot of SaaS software. While pre-built SaaS products allowed business users to quickly tech enable their processes, they continued to leave behind a legacy of software maintenance for CIOs as each SaaS product still came with its legacy software, tools, vendor management needs, subscription cost maintenance and more. With the adoption of no-code, the technology stack will get consolidated and digital transformation needs will move towards micro-SaaS products built internally by the Company on the same platform and therefore on the same technology stack.
Significant drop in the total cost of ownership (‘TCO’):
No-code platforms have already brought down the TCO significantly from framework-based development. However, with autonomous app development powered through speech, TCO will significantly drop further as the cost of support and maintenance as well as upgrades or change requests based on business scenarios is minimal.
True democratization of technology
No-code platforms of the future will enable true democratization of technology. The ability to imagine and use natural language to build automation opens up the ecosystem to not only developers and business analysts but also students, start-up founders and other stakeholders that were constrained in the past in being able to bring their ideas to life.
Boundless innovation and development:
At the heart of digital transformation is the ability to make big changes and reinvent business processes along with using techniques like AI/ ML to drive actionable insights for business decisions. The use of speech to develop applications allows for ideas and imagination to be converted to reality without having to worry about complex architecture, coding language or technology knowledge. With this, innovation can be brought back to the forefront which in the last era got lost in cumbersome coding procedures, waterfall, and agile techniques of development where results actualised after months and years of planning. With no-code, new features and ideas can be developed and actualised in days and weeks.
The speed of innovation in the financial services space today needs no-code to deliver on more complex and innovative asks. Autonomous app development, true technology democratization and bringing down the TCO will become important asks in the need to tech-enable and digitize business offerings and change the way consumers interact and operate with next-gen products and services.
