" class="no-js "lang="en-US"> EXCLUSIVE: ‘Here’s the low down...’ – Ron Wellman, Mendix in ‘The Paytech Magazine’ - Fintech Finance
Friday, March 29, 2024

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Here’s the low down…’ – Ron Wellman, Mendix in ‘The Paytech Magazine’

Ron Wellman, Head of Industry Clouds at low-code platform Mendix looks at how it can make life a lot simpler for financial services in a changing worldRon Wellman, Mendix | Fintech Finance

The finance industry is undergoing a radical shift, driven by new competition from fintechs, changing business models, mounting regulation and compliance pressures. And yet the industry is significantly ahead of many others when it comes to technology. Finance teams are able to collaborate from anywhere in the world, keep up with innovations – such as customers paying from their watches, checking their real-time balance on their phone at any time of the day or night, even executing trades 24/7 – and are able to operate faster than ever before.

But how can it ensure that it stays ahead in the post-pandemic world?

Increasing challenges

While the world embraces innovation, it’s easy to forget that the sector’s reality is incredibly complex. The radical changes caused by COVID-19 have highlighted how challenging maintaining its innovation is. On top of this, financial services is one of the sectors most affected by Brexit. As highlighted by Mendix’s Navigating The UK Landscape research, financial services businesses have severe concerns about the impact of Brexit on their industry.

Many believe that it has damaged the reputation of the UK as a centre of finance (67 per cent) and created functional challenges for businesses in the country. When it comes to IT teams within the sector, it would be fair to say that the mission of financial IT leaders is often under-appreciated. They deal with antiquated systems dating back decades, inefficient data management processes, and mounting security and compliance considerations every day to keep the business running efficiently and safely. Add to this the need to get additional staff to work remotely and keep remaining staff safe during lockdown, and the already time-poor IT leaders are now entirely swamped.

With all of this happening within the sector, it is no surprise to see many organisations turn to low-code technology. Low-code is a powerful enterprise-grade, model-driven visual development approach to empowering citizen and professional developers to make Cloud-native applications more than 10 times faster for web and mobile. It uses drag-and-drop components and easy-to-configure workflows – all through an intuitive graphical user interface.

The benefits of low code

As the financial services sector embarks on the next phase of its digital journey, IT leaders need to look beyond their immediate staff to create more efficient internal processes, revenue-generating services that genuinely answer the clients’ needs and empower developers with the right tools. This requires further collaboration between IT and business line staff to design services that suit the customer base while reducing the pressure of an already-stretched IT department.

 

Enter low-code: 58 per cent of leaders across financial services already say that low-code has enabled the development of new applications to support their companies post-Brexit. And, of all the financial and non-financial industries surveyed in the report, insurance leaders are making the greatest use of it. Seven in 10 insurance providers say this developmental approach has allowed them to implement new applications post-Brexit – which will be a valuable asset for both the IT and other business departments.

Low-code software development provides a simple solution to address the constraints and challenges facing financial services. Besides which, this approach allows for reskilling resources possibly at risk from digitisation as well as flexible, iterative app development for many use cases in the financial services sector. That includes legacy application upgrades to comply with new regulations, apps supporting innovative banking or portfolio management, and mortgage application management.

With low-code, the financial services industry has the right tools to untangle its complex processes, supercharge its digital transformation and focus on its core mission, which is serving clients and the wider financial industry. Low-code will be the top priority to invest in, over the coming years.


 

This article was published in The Paytech Magazine #09, Page 55

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