Why should banks adopt low-code platforms?
From a developer’s perspective
It is the dream of every company to hire the top talents in the market. The kind of opportunities that are presented to the talents in the IT industry in today’s world is huge. These talents consider a lot of factors before accepting the offers.
Though money is a bigger factor, it isn’t the only one anymore. Their career path, growth opportunity and the kind of doors this job would open up for them are other big factors.
It becomes all the more important for the organisations to attract the right talent that will stick around and grow with you rather than being a rolling door for people to step in and out of the company regularly.
The top talents in IT generally fall under one of these two categories.
One that is hell-bent on learning every new technology on the street and get their hands dirty by applying new design patterns onto their current solutions. Let’s call these people “Engineers”
And the other is so concentrated on learning the nuances of the domain they work on and they work to master their communication skills. Let’s call these people “Designers”
An engineer’s career path is very different from that of a designer. I consider an engineer to be a misfit in a bank. It's the designers, who find the banks a very attractive opportunity to work.
When the engineer wants to learn and do a quick PoC around a new technology which he/she feel the right fit for solving the problem at hand, they can’t download, install and experiment straight-away in a secured bank network. Firstly, it has to be checked whether the software is approved by the bank, then the engineer should get approval to install the new software in his local machine. The list goes on. By the time the engineer run pole to post for approval and get it, he/she might lose the interest to actually explore it.
Most of the time, the developers in the bank go the laid-out route. The big architects provide a template/pattern that every application in the bank should follow. It means two things. One, It leaves very little opportunity for a developer to go wrong. Two, It also leaves very little to the developer to explore and experiment. The Designers will find this to be perfect since they don’t have to break their head around technologies too much and can go about solving the actual problems in the bank that would provide them opportunities to learn the nitty-gritty of the business.
This is not at all a bad thing. Every enterprise has its culture. A bank should be secure. It shouldn’t allow random software on to its network. It should follow tight architectural design patterns mandated across its enterprise applications. In fact, most developers in the bank would aim to grow into this enterprise architect role over time since this requires much more than mastery over technologies.
Also, the other very important factor to be considered, How do they go about their daily schedules? In a typical bank, a developer will have to talk to various teams like Business solutions, QA and other ancillary teams. This kind of takes away 4 hours of the day on an average. For someone who is so interested in learning new technologies all along the way, this may become monotonous. The designers though will find it interesting enough because each of these conversations is a stepping stone for them to grow one level up in the hierarchy.
These developers/designers are much more inclined to get into solving the functional problems at hand than to concentrate too much on the technical side of things. Providing them low-code platforms to work with makes their job easier and lets them invest their time and effort onto things that really matter.
These developers don’t really have to think about handling threads or setting time-outs. Let the platform handle it for them. Let them design and build solutions on top of these platforms to help their business grow.
Many banks, by now have realised in their legacy-modernisation journey, how difficult it is to replace tens of thousands of lines of code. Sometimes, there are business nuances buried in the fine prints that are overlooked initially during modernisation. Low code platforms simplify these problems through their graphical representation of code. They employ a simple drag and drop technique to build solutions wherein the actual code in the backend is being written by the platforms and they are not the developer’s problem anymore. They align with the principles of the bank as they leave very little opportunity for a developer to go wrong.
In a way, these low-code platforms are an extension of what these primitive technologies do. They allow the user to write in coding languages (with syntaxes and libraries) and provide a base software on top of which the code can run on the machine.
These platforms they go one step further in the game and allows the developer to break the shackles of technology through user-friendly plugins and business-friendly GUI.
If you were wondering who would attract these talented engineers, all these low-code platforms run on the back of a very good engineering team.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are personal
