Accelerating digital transformation with low code

With the pandemic changing the business landscape, digital transformation, from merely being a buzzword, transformed into a reality for many enterprises across industries. According to a recent McKinsey study, “competitive differentiation, now more than ever, emerges from superior digital capabilities and technology endowment, more agile delivery and a progressively more tech-savvy C-suite”.

While the importance of digital capabilities has never been lost on business leaders, the sense of urgency attached to digital transformation has heightened significantly – so much so that speed is becoming a top priority for leaders across geographies and industries. Research suggests that the impact is felt even more resonantly in banking and insurance.

Digital competition is largely responsible for the increased pressure, but rapidly shifting customer behaviour is the key driver for this urgency. Customers expect their financial service providers to be a partner in their day-to-day lifestyle decisions. They demand ease of access to banking services or insurance policies the same way they hail a taxi or buy things online: instantly.

This need for speed is not limited to operational responsiveness. For instance, strategic agility – how fast a bank launches a new lending product or an insurance firm adapts its underwriting philosophy and policies – matters more than ever.

Accelerating digital transformation demands a different approach from the traditional ways of managing business applications.

Low code for transformation with speed

“Business technologists want to create and execute their own ideas to drive more automation across their business applications and workflows,” says Gartner. “The needs of business-driven hyper-automation will drive the adoption of low code through 2022.”

Just as the cloud eased scalability and distributed access at an infrastructure level in the past decade, low code platforms can equip an organisation with the ability to develop their business applications faster through digital technologies that are abstracted for ease and functional richness.

Low code platforms do this by employing visual, declarative techniques instead of programming to build applications, accelerating the pace of pro developers and allowing business experts to lead or participate in solution delivery.

Low code as a concept is not new. Business automation and digital transformation platforms, such as NewgenONE from Newgen, have woven their architecture around low code philosophy and delivered solutions for more than two decades. And there is evidence of the speed advantage derived from a low code platform such as NewgenONE.

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“Recently, a leading health insurance provider developed and launched a core health insurance system using NewgenONE,” says Alex de Capitani, Head of US Enterprise Operations at Newgen. “With NewgenONE’s low code capability, it was able to deliver on business expectations within eight months of expressing the need, even though most of its teams were working remotely due to the pandemic. The application has hundreds of screens, tens of processes, complex business rules, integrations, and strict security and compliance requirements. The traditional approach for such an ask would entail 2.5 to 4 times the time and effort.”

It is not surprising, then, that more and more enterprises are looking at low code platforms to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. According to Gartner, by 2024, more than 65 per cent of application development activity will be driven by low code.

Value beyond speed: customer experience

Low code platforms are spread across a range of functional spectrums. At one end are the no-code platforms that support simpler business applications. The other end of the spectrum comprises the robust enterprise-scale process automation platforms that can enable rapid development of even complex mission-critical applications. A digital transformation platform such as NewgenONE belongs in the latter category.

The ability to deliver complex mission-critical applications with agility is a potent arsenal. Those are the applications that drive the key customer outcomes.

In banking, for instance, being able to close a large, complex, commercial loan with speed is formidable competitive leverage. However, it is not only about being fast. A digital transformation platform can tie in the end-to-end customer journey – from loan application to funding – across channels, delivering a superior omnichannel customer experience.

And, when customer dynamics shift, as has been the norm in the digital world, these customer-facing applications can be adopted quickly with low code to launch new customer-friendly products and services before the competition catches up.

“Such accelerated digital transformation is becoming a key priority for our banking and financial services customers, driven by increasingly digital customer habits,” says Kurt Dyer, Banking Lead (Americas) at Newgen. “We are in a great position to leverage our experience of almost three decades in enabling success for banking customers globally and to combine that knowledge with cutting-edge technologies to deliver an accelerated digital journey for our customers.”

In this rapidly shifting landscape – where underwriting is expected in real time, insurance risk management is transforming from mitigation to incident prevention, large complex loans are expected to be quickly closed and customers can easily switch loyalties – any bank or insurance firm cannot rest on their past laurels. The need to transform is now – and the answer is a low code digital transformation platform.

For more information, please visit www.newgensoft.com