Financial services industry leaders overwhelmingly choose low-code platforms to manage their automation—81% of industry-leading companies say they are ahead or far ahead of competitors in adopting low-code platforms. What makes platforms so appealing to these companies? Well, many things, but not least the way they enable non-technical employees to design and manage applications and automation workflows with little to no developer support. In other words, their ability to democratize automation.
Platforms let business users get involved in workflow development—no coding required.
Low-code platforms have easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interfaces that allow users to draw workflows rather than code them. This makes platforms accessible to business users with no coding experience, but professional developers like them too. “Developers can use [low-code platforms] to achieve things quickly,” says Stuart Duncan, Partner at NextWave Consulting, which is an advisor to some of the world’s largest banks, asset managers, and fintechs. “[They] also help developers to communicate more effectively and directly with business stakeholders because the interfaces are visual and intuitive, which means there is less of a need for a business analyst to act as an interpreter between IT and other business areas.”
Sharing basic application development responsibility with non-IT teams frees IT up to focus on more innovative work.
According to a report by The Economist, at 55% of the companies surveyed, business units do more than IT teams to procure or develop new applications. And what’s more, 53% of business decision-makers believe the volume of applications built or sourced by non-IT business units will increase over the next 12 months. Low-code platforms will make this sharing of development responsibility as efficient as possible.
With low-code platforms enabling employees across the wider enterprise to support development, IT professionals are freed up for higher value, more innovative work. The speed of low-code platforms also plays a role in allowing developers to spend more time on innovation. “After the first two projects we delivered using our low-code platform, our work was so fast compared with the previous, coding-heavy approach that our business stakeholders did not believe we could possibly have completed the work,” says Giovanni Gallucci, Head of Process Automation at ICCREA Banking Group.
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