Financial institutions face three enduring IT challenges: first, the maintenance and upgrade of legacy monolithic enterprise applications; second, the suboptimal behaviour of embedded third-party vendors in terms of slowness to upgrade functionality and the locking-down of any customisability; and third, the increasing workload arising from the digital transformation and electronification of most markets. This article looks at how low code, the next breakthrough technology on the technology continuum, used in concert with cloud, microservices and open-source technology, can be employed to not only alleviate the three main challenges faced by IT teams, but also reduce costs, improve the efficiency of developers, enhance the fitness of purpose of software and improve time from idea to production.
Low-code development is a form of rapid application development that gives users the option to use scripting or predefined code. To a degree, it automates development, generating code by calling on ready-made quick-to-assemble components to accelerate the production of software. The adoption of low-code technology is rising across the financial services sector, with one study suggesting that 65% of application development will be undertaken using low- code technology by 2024. This dramatic increase may be a consequence of the already widespread adoption of a tri-vector of key synergistic technologies: cloud, open-source code and microservices architecture.
