Payments has always been a technology-heavy area of financial services. The end-to-end payments lifecycle leverages sophisticated, high-volume transaction processing to link a purchase event through multi-step merchant processing and ultimately to settlement by card issuers. And every part of the lifecycle requires the deployment of different kinds of technology.
One kind of technology that has proven particularly effective in this area is “Low-code/No-code” (LCNC), which was introduced to the global financial services market several years ago and has enabled increasingly sophisticated capability to quickly solve complex business problems. Supported by a range of software vendors, including all of the major public cloud providers, LCNC platforms allow applications, analytics, and data transformations to be “coded” by people who are not software engineers. Users describe what they want an application to do via elements such as screen layouts and process flows, and then the LCNC platform creates and deploys the application.
The business applications for LCNC tools are vast, and financial services and payments companies are leveraging them across their technology footprint. In the retail banking industry for example, 41% of companies reported that they are experimenting with LCNC, while an additional 31% have it on their technology roadmap. Organizations are seeing rapid returns in several areas as LCNC platforms mature. Here are three of the most exciting ones.
The challenge with these relatively simple applications is that deploying scarce software engineering capacity to create them often doesn’t make sense, given the more complex business problems that many organizations need to solve in their core payment processing. So either they are not implemented at all, or non-technology teams implement them manually using end user tools such as Excel. This is never an optimal solution, potentially introducing excess cost and risk into business processes.
LCNC tools create the code necessary to implement and deploy an application described by the business user, no software developers required. Because most LCNC tools are themselves enterprise-scale platforms and enforce the necessary standards, controls, and software development processes, the applications they produce are enterprise class — they meet enterprise risk management, resilience, and scalability standards despite being rapidly created at relatively low cost.
There is, however, a class of LCNC tools focused on making complex data wrangling processes faster and easier. These tools allow non-technical users to capture data from hundreds of different types of sources in different formats, manipulate it through transformations, and then produce data outputs ready for input into analysis and visualization tools. The process of “wrangling”, or defining the logic for data manipulation is accomplished using visual interfaces rather than via code.
Again, these platforms are enterprise class and allow an organization to enforce its data governance rules while letting hundreds or thousands of end users leverage data to improve operational processes, decision making, and reporting. As such, they solve many of the problems that come with Excel, the primary tool most businesses now use for data manipulation.
These tools allow users to model workflows in which information is captured and moved along a process, manipulated by successive workers as well as by decision rules and calculation engines. Each workflow and its associated data is modeled visually and then deployed to an enterprise-class platform. There are nearly innumerable areas in a large merchant organization or financial services firm in which these types of business processes exist, especially in operations. Transitioning to BPM tools in these areas will drive operation risk reduction, efficiency, transparency, and speed. The more an organization can do it, the better.
Further, there are many use cases that are not well supported by LCNC. It is important to consider the limits of any tool before applying it to solve a specific problem, and LCNC tools are no exception. But when deployed and managed correctly, these tools provide merchants, financial services firms and payments companies with significant leverage and allow them to address gaps in their application and technology landscape without requiring additional software engineering capacity. The business returns they generate can be substantial.