Weekly Wrap: How open-banking, RPA and low-code tools are driving automation
UiPath debuts on the NYSE amid growing adoption for open banking and a rise of low-code tools
Bank Automation News this week looked at the maturation of digitization and automation trends while also exploring how low-code tools might be leveraged by financial institutions going forward. While robotic process automation (RPA) is having a moment in the sun, as seen by RPA vendor UiPath’s debut on public bourses this week, low-code tools and open-banking continue to gain traction.
Low-code platform maker FintechOS raised $60 million in a Series B funding round on Wednesday, and new data from FDX, a nonprofit working to standardize open-banking pipelines, shows that 16 million consumers in the US and Canada now use the group’s API gateways to interact with financial data repositories.
In today’s episode of The Buzz, Publisher JJ Hornblass and Associate Editor Jaspreet Kalra discuss what these trends indicate for the automation market and how the tech is likely to evolve going forward.
Subscribe to The Buzz Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or download the episode.
The following is a transcript generated by AI technology that has been lightly edited but still contains errors.
JJ Hornblass
Hi, everyone. I’m JJ Hornblass and welcome to the Buzz from Bank Automation News where we chart the future of banking automation technology. This is our weekly wrap for what’s happening in the industry as of April 23 2021. Before we begin a great thanks to our advertisers Narmi, MX and Ailleron for their support, thank you to them and I am pleased to be joined by Jaspreet Kalra from the Bank Automation News editorial team. Hello Jaspree. In general technology news, first off, the Intel CEO said yesterday that semiconductor chip supply constraints could last two years. The CEO said that the supply constraints that have affected some sectors of the global economy will continue until more capacity comes online and that will take time and that’s as reported by the Wall Street Journal. crypto, the cryptocurrency market lost $200 billion of market cap just yesterday, as the bitcoin price plunged below $50,000 a Bitcoin on news that President Biden is expected to raise long term capital gains tax. It is reported that Apple is working on upgrades to its AI messenger iMessage service with the eventual goal of making it more like a social network to better compete with Facebook’s WhatsApp application. In banking automation industry news, we are going to discuss what will really drive automation in the future, whether that’s open banking, or low code, applications and services, we’re going to start by discussing news from financial data exchange FDX. What is FDX? And what milestone did they cross recently?Jaspreet Kalra
So FDX is a nonprofit that essentially wants to standardize payment methods. So let me try that. Again. In terms of fd x being an nonprofit group, it tries to standardize data sharing methods, almost like building standardized pipes for data to move around from one Financial Group to the other, be it a payment processor, be at a bank or be an online payment servicing app. And the milestone that they recently crossed in the release data on this yesterday was that 16 million people in US and Canada now use their open banking API’s to conduct these transactions. And that is notable also because they will date it was thought that the European Union area especially the UK was the leader in open banking, regulation and adoption. But these numbers show that these things are taking off, especially with the digitization trend that we’ve seen over the last year, things like Venmo, things like cash are becoming a lot more popular, that we’re also seeing open banking transform how different institutions within the payments and financial space interact and share information with each other. And ft x is sort of at the center of this because they’re standardized. pipelines, run that data across the systems.JJ Hornblass
Let’s hold that in advance for just a moment. And talk about the two other developments of node in the industry this past week. Ui path, really the leading RPA automation technology provider in the out there now, certainly for financial services, priced its IPO on Wednesday. the share price is shares priced at $56 a share they are now at $75 a share which represents a market cap of slightly over 39 billion. The other news development was that low code platform maker FinTech alesse, raised $60 million dollars in a Series B and what’s notable or what ties the two them together. That news to the UI path news is that it’s good Draper is spray, the venture firm that had invested in UiPath. That was also a part of FinTech OS is Series B. So jasprit. What do those two developments, say to you about kind of market priorities or market perceptions of opportunity, as it relates to automation technology? Certainly,Jaspreet Kalra
those two companies are so uniquely different in the sense that UiPath is a much more mature company been in this space for more than 10 years now, doing this thing, whereas FinTech wise is a local development platform that’s raising its series D now, but the common ground here becomes that both these sort of services are quick to deploy, can eliminate some tasks without having to rip up the entire legacy system and recreate entire workflows. So what you’ve seen, both started with, say digitization in 2020, is now also moving forward to like, Can we do it at scale, and can we do it in a way that is sustainable, and not just a quick gap measure, to prep to keep the work flowing, while people are not inside offices? Now on the one hand, you have a WebPart, it serves a lot of Fortune 500 companies counts, the biggest corporate has the biggest corporations in the world among its clients. yet, at the same time, the common thread being that there’s a lot of back end workflows that are tedious tasks that need to be done on an Excel screen, just by saying moving data from one screen to the other. And now you have software that can do that. And, as as as humorous as it is, software doesn’t have any downtime, so it doesn’t take weekends off. So those things naturally, you know, represent an efficiency gain for a lot of companies. And they’re also looking to use tools that are not too complicated to deploy, like it shouldn’t take too long to deploy in when it’s only eliminating a simple task. So that’s where I think local comes in. These are like drag and drop tools for developers who know what they’re doing. So they can build on those tools. And very often, say, within an organization, the people who are doing those tasks, know what tasks need to be eliminated. So to have them sit down in a room with six developers and then develop a unique program to deploy, it would be much more complicated than taking a local tool that has the basics built in already, but you can customize it as per your needs. So I think clients are like any company looking to sort of deploy these automations going forward, we’ll be looking for that sort of flexibility in terms of Canvas to that, and also the and also an X task that can be reassigned to if we don’t need it for that anymore. And those sort of things really come fleshed out in rocor, and RPA applications that are easier to read tool, and redirect in terms of the tasks you’re looking to eliminate and automate.JJ Hornblass
So let’s deal with the question that we started, which is low code, or API’s or open banking. Now, let’s just put a bit more specificity around the question. Because obviously, a low core low code platform really has it less relevance if there are an API applications, API API opportunities, applications, that they can be a part of the deployment. So let’s just leave that issue for a moment. The question really is, is that which is the head of the of the fish, which is the real primary, at least currently, right now, that is going to kind of lead to the type of tech technology adoption that we’ve already seen them enter and expect to continue to see. I’ll let you give your opinion before I share mine just free up. SoJaspreet Kalra
the analogy I would go back to here is something like say Facebook was a sector when Facebook was on when Facebook came out Initially, it was the social media to be at, which I think is a lot what RPA is right now, it’s a solution that almost everyone understands, has been around for a while. So there’s some level of trust built into it. But at the same time, you have new technology appearing on the horizon, the local tools. Now on the one hand, RPA tools also have their limitations in terms of how much in a complexity they can process is it RPA in many ways, is thought of the linear automation, which is you ask it to move again, from one shelf to the other, it can do that, if you ask it to do more than that it might not be able to. Whereas on the other hand, local gives you more of that flexibility to develop tools that can go beyond just one linear process and at the same time tasks that are uniquely suited to save go code. stuff would be, as I mentioned earlier, moving data from one excel sheet to the other, simplify tasks that can be done through software that doesn’t need extensive programming. So I would say, local is the tick tock here, it’s a good challenge. Oh, but right now, it’s still nascent. It’s still developing as a tool that people may or may not completely understand and or trust right now. So you’re gonna see those transitions play out, for sure. But I think RPA is a much bigger sort of bucket right now with a lot more people using it. And that, that sort of UAE but IPO also speaks to that. So companies and companies reach a certain level of maturation, they want to be traded on public markets, whereas a lot of those local enterprises are still in the startup phase, you’re seeing experimentation, you’re seeing a lot of new techniques being played out. But that’s sort of maturation might be, I mean, predicting the future is a beast, but a couple of years or so, obviously.JJ Hornblass
But it is the it is the question is the open is, is the open banking. Dynamic. so crucial, right? That’s also sort of the question here. And what I look at this f dx news of 16 million users. And frankly, it seems underwhelming to me, when you compare, just think of one of the major banks, so bank of america now, it last quarter crossed 40 million digital active users, they’re adding 1 million, approximately 1 million digital active users every quarter for MDX to, you know, sure. 16 million is a big number on some level, but to some other, you know, to looking at it with another lens in regards to the kind of the number of users, banking users and total in the United States, this is a relatively inconsequential number. And at least today, or this week, I should say, this week, you know, that evidence suggests that the market is favoring or placing its bads or viewing with, you know, greater viewing the greater valuation as coming from the low code, side of the fence, because I mean, UI path is also to some degree, a low code provider, with its, you know, studio product where it’s a drag and draw, you know, RPA bot building tool, as one, I mean, there are other tools that they offer, but some of it is low code. So, you know, it seems to me that, when you weigh this kind of open banking, versus low code dynamic, at least the market is telling us or telling, at least, it seems to be telling me that it’s really the low code side that has the greater import, and the facilitation of the API’s is, is somewhat secondary, in importance to the ability to deploy quickly and inexpensively and within and to do so within the rubric of you know, banking systems as, as complex as some of them are. Agree or disagree with that jaspreetUnknown Speaker
partially agree,Jaspreet Kalra
you know, more, more of a tempered approach to seeing what might play out and I think sex is Don Cardinal put it very well, to me, in our interview, in the sense that he said that every wave of adoption tends to be bigger than the last one. And that plays out in different markets almost in the uniform way that See, when mobile check deposits became a thing Initially, it was a small thing that was added to your bank app, no one really paid that much attention to it. But now almost everyone uses it, and we’ve gotten used to it. And we don’t have any questions that, you know, prevent us from using it anymore. So that we I would say that open banking really represents a lot of pluses in terms of payments functionalities, where you’re seeing a lot of this data that was sitting siloed is now able to move around more easily. And on the other hand, when you go to the low code side of things where it’s easier to develop tools, that do those is a very things, you’re going to see more adoption, certainly. But when it comes to enterprise level adoption, which are the major demand drivers for a lot of these tools, a lot of these organizations are also looking for someone to build out those tools, and then give it to them, and not have to devote an entire section of their own employees to build out these two. So I think there’s different applications on each end. And when it comes to sort of what’s going to be driving the demand going forward, and what’s going to be dividing the port customers need, I think, freer flow or movement of data, especially with more control is going to be a central issue as we move towards this digitized banking it. But at the same time, you’re going to see companies look to make efficiency gains by removing a lot of those legacy and processes and siloed storage is never holding them back for so long. So I think it’s going to be a more of a symbiotic relationship, but certainly locode is going to be an area of growth to watch out for for any enterprise looking to deploy these applications.JJ Hornblass
An excellent answer jesperi. Thank you so much. What do we have? I’m gonna let you have the last word on that. So what do we have planned for our readers next week.Jaspreet Kalra
So going forward, I’m going to start looking into how the EU is looking to regulate AI technologies. And they’ve made three broad buckets, unusually high risk, or informatively, high risk, high risk and low risk applications. And there’s a lot of expectations that this will increase compliance requirements on the applications. So one of my stories will explore whether such rules are likely to trickle into us guidelines. And also this trend of how a lot of banks and financial institutions and credit unions are now turning to robo advisors to deliver some extra value to their customers, and hopefully retain them and keep them from going away to another institution, which, as Jamie Simon said, in his letter banks are facing challenges from everywhere. So those are the sort of main themes we’ll be exploring next week.JJ Hornblass
Excellent. jasprit. Thank you so much. And thank you all for joining us for this episode of the buzz. Please follow us on Twitter, and LinkedIn and of course, visit us at Bank automation news.com where you can get all sorts of excellent insights and news from the industry. Again, thank you for joining us on the buzz. We’ll see you next time.
Hi, everyone. I’m JJ Hornblass and welcome to the Buzz from Bank Automation News where we chart the future of banking automation technology. This is our weekly wrap for what’s happening in the industry as of April 23 2021. Before we begin a great thanks to our advertisers Narmi, MX and Ailleron for their support, thank you to them and I am pleased to be joined by Jaspreet Kalra from the Bank Automation News editorial team. Hello Jaspree. In general technology news, first off, the Intel CEO said yesterday that semiconductor chip supply constraints could last two years. The CEO said that the supply constraints that have affected some sectors of the global economy will continue until more capacity comes online and that will take time and that’s as reported by the Wall Street Journal. crypto, the cryptocurrency market lost $200 billion of market cap just yesterday, as the bitcoin price plunged below $50,000 a Bitcoin on news that President Biden is expected to raise long term capital gains tax. It is reported that Apple is working on upgrades to its AI messenger iMessage service with the eventual goal of making it more like a social network to better compete with Facebook’s WhatsApp application. In banking automation industry news, we are going to discuss what will really drive automation in the future, whether that’s open banking, or low code, applications and services, we’re going to start by discussing news from financial data exchange FDX. What is FDX? And what milestone did they cross recently?Jaspreet Kalra
So FDX is a nonprofit that essentially wants to standardize payment methods. So let me try that. Again. In terms of fd x being an nonprofit group, it tries to standardize data sharing methods, almost like building standardized pipes for data to move around from one Financial Group to the other, be it a payment processor, be at a bank or be an online payment servicing app. And the milestone that they recently crossed in the release data on this yesterday was that 16 million people in US and Canada now use their open banking API’s to conduct these transactions. And that is notable also because they will date it was thought that the European Union area especially the UK was the leader in open banking, regulation and adoption. But these numbers show that these things are taking off, especially with the digitization trend that we’ve seen over the last year, things like Venmo, things like cash are becoming a lot more popular, that we’re also seeing open banking transform how different institutions within the payments and financial space interact and share information with each other. And ft x is sort of at the center of this because they’re standardized. pipelines, run that data across the systems.JJ Hornblass
Let’s hold that in advance for just a moment. And talk about the two other developments of node in the industry this past week. Ui path, really the leading RPA automation technology provider in the out there now, certainly for financial services, priced its IPO on Wednesday. the share price is shares priced at $56 a share they are now at $75 a share which represents a market cap of slightly over 39 billion. The other news development was that low code platform maker FinTech alesse, raised $60 million dollars in a Series B and what’s notable or what ties the two them together. That news to the UI path news is that it’s good Draper is spray, the venture firm that had invested in UiPath. That was also a part of FinTech OS is Series B. So jasprit. What do those two developments, say to you about kind of market priorities or market perceptions of opportunity, as it relates to automation technology? Certainly,Jaspreet Kalra
those two companies are so uniquely different in the sense that UiPath is a much more mature company been in this space for more than 10 years now, doing this thing, whereas FinTech wise is a local development platform that’s raising its series D now, but the common ground here becomes that both these sort of services are quick to deploy, can eliminate some tasks without having to rip up the entire legacy system and recreate entire workflows. So what you’ve seen, both started with, say digitization in 2020, is now also moving forward to like, Can we do it at scale, and can we do it in a way that is sustainable, and not just a quick gap measure, to prep to keep the work flowing, while people are not inside offices? Now on the one hand, you have a WebPart, it serves a lot of Fortune 500 companies counts, the biggest corporate has the biggest corporations in the world among its clients. yet, at the same time, the common thread being that there’s a lot of back end workflows that are tedious tasks that need to be done on an Excel screen, just by saying moving data from one screen to the other. And now you have software that can do that. And, as as as humorous as it is, software doesn’t have any downtime, so it doesn’t take weekends off. So those things naturally, you know, represent an efficiency gain for a lot of companies. And they’re also looking to use tools that are not too complicated to deploy, like it shouldn’t take too long to deploy in when it’s only eliminating a simple task. So that’s where I think local comes in. These are like drag and drop tools for developers who know what they’re doing. So they can build on those tools. And very often, say, within an organization, the people who are doing those tasks, know what tasks need to be eliminated. So to have them sit down in a room with six developers and then develop a unique program to deploy, it would be much more complicated than taking a local tool that has the basics built in already, but you can customize it as per your needs. So I think clients are like any company looking to sort of deploy these automations going forward, we’ll be looking for that sort of flexibility in terms of Canvas to that, and also the and also an X task that can be reassigned to if we don’t need it for that anymore. And those sort of things really come fleshed out in rocor, and RPA applications that are easier to read tool, and redirect in terms of the tasks you’re looking to eliminate and automate.JJ Hornblass
So let’s deal with the question that we started, which is low code, or API’s or open banking. Now, let’s just put a bit more specificity around the question. Because obviously, a low core low code platform really has it less relevance if there are an API applications, API API opportunities, applications, that they can be a part of the deployment. So let’s just leave that issue for a moment. The question really is, is that which is the head of the of the fish, which is the real primary, at least currently, right now, that is going to kind of lead to the type of tech technology adoption that we’ve already seen them enter and expect to continue to see. I’ll let you give your opinion before I share mine just free up. SoJaspreet Kalra
the analogy I would go back to here is something like say Facebook was a sector when Facebook was on when Facebook came out Initially, it was the social media to be at, which I think is a lot what RPA is right now, it’s a solution that almost everyone understands, has been around for a while. So there’s some level of trust built into it. But at the same time, you have new technology appearing on the horizon, the local tools. Now on the one hand, RPA tools also have their limitations in terms of how much in a complexity they can process is it RPA in many ways, is thought of the linear automation, which is you ask it to move again, from one shelf to the other, it can do that, if you ask it to do more than that it might not be able to. Whereas on the other hand, local gives you more of that flexibility to develop tools that can go beyond just one linear process and at the same time tasks that are uniquely suited to save go code. stuff would be, as I mentioned earlier, moving data from one excel sheet to the other, simplify tasks that can be done through software that doesn’t need extensive programming. So I would say, local is the tick tock here, it’s a good challenge. Oh, but right now, it’s still nascent. It’s still developing as a tool that people may or may not completely understand and or trust right now. So you’re gonna see those transitions play out, for sure. But I think RPA is a much bigger sort of bucket right now with a lot more people using it. And that, that sort of UAE but IPO also speaks to that. So companies and companies reach a certain level of maturation, they want to be traded on public markets, whereas a lot of those local enterprises are still in the startup phase, you’re seeing experimentation, you’re seeing a lot of new techniques being played out. But that’s sort of maturation might be, I mean, predicting the future is a beast, but a couple of years or so, obviously.JJ Hornblass
But it is the it is the question is the open is, is the open banking. Dynamic. so crucial, right? That’s also sort of the question here. And what I look at this f dx news of 16 million users. And frankly, it seems underwhelming to me, when you compare, just think of one of the major banks, so bank of america now, it last quarter crossed 40 million digital active users, they’re adding 1 million, approximately 1 million digital active users every quarter for MDX to, you know, sure. 16 million is a big number on some level, but to some other, you know, to looking at it with another lens in regards to the kind of the number of users, banking users and total in the United States, this is a relatively inconsequential number. And at least today, or this week, I should say, this week, you know, that evidence suggests that the market is favoring or placing its bads or viewing with, you know, greater viewing the greater valuation as coming from the low code, side of the fence, because I mean, UI path is also to some degree, a low code provider, with its, you know, studio product where it’s a drag and draw, you know, RPA bot building tool, as one, I mean, there are other tools that they offer, but some of it is low code. So, you know, it seems to me that, when you weigh this kind of open banking, versus low code dynamic, at least the market is telling us or telling, at least, it seems to be telling me that it’s really the low code side that has the greater import, and the facilitation of the API’s is, is somewhat secondary, in importance to the ability to deploy quickly and inexpensively and within and to do so within the rubric of you know, banking systems as, as complex as some of them are. Agree or disagree with that jaspreetUnknown Speaker
partially agree,Jaspreet Kalra
you know, more, more of a tempered approach to seeing what might play out and I think sex is Don Cardinal put it very well, to me, in our interview, in the sense that he said that every wave of adoption tends to be bigger than the last one. And that plays out in different markets almost in the uniform way that See, when mobile check deposits became a thing Initially, it was a small thing that was added to your bank app, no one really paid that much attention to it. But now almost everyone uses it, and we’ve gotten used to it. And we don’t have any questions that, you know, prevent us from using it anymore. So that we I would say that open banking really represents a lot of pluses in terms of payments functionalities, where you’re seeing a lot of this data that was sitting siloed is now able to move around more easily. And on the other hand, when you go to the low code side of things where it’s easier to develop tools, that do those is a very things, you’re going to see more adoption, certainly. But when it comes to enterprise level adoption, which are the major demand drivers for a lot of these tools, a lot of these organizations are also looking for someone to build out those tools, and then give it to them, and not have to devote an entire section of their own employees to build out these two. So I think there’s different applications on each end. And when it comes to sort of what’s going to be driving the demand going forward, and what’s going to be dividing the port customers need, I think, freer flow or movement of data, especially with more control is going to be a central issue as we move towards this digitized banking it. But at the same time, you’re going to see companies look to make efficiency gains by removing a lot of those legacy and processes and siloed storage is never holding them back for so long. So I think it’s going to be a more of a symbiotic relationship, but certainly locode is going to be an area of growth to watch out for for any enterprise looking to deploy these applications.JJ Hornblass
An excellent answer jesperi. Thank you so much. What do we have? I’m gonna let you have the last word on that. So what do we have planned for our readers next week.Jaspreet Kalra
So going forward, I’m going to start looking into how the EU is looking to regulate AI technologies. And they’ve made three broad buckets, unusually high risk, or informatively, high risk, high risk and low risk applications. And there’s a lot of expectations that this will increase compliance requirements on the applications. So one of my stories will explore whether such rules are likely to trickle into us guidelines. And also this trend of how a lot of banks and financial institutions and credit unions are now turning to robo advisors to deliver some extra value to their customers, and hopefully retain them and keep them from going away to another institution, which, as Jamie Simon said, in his letter banks are facing challenges from everywhere. So those are the sort of main themes we’ll be exploring next week.JJ Hornblass
Excellent. jasprit. Thank you so much. And thank you all for joining us for this episode of the buzz. Please follow us on Twitter, and LinkedIn and of course, visit us at Bank automation news.com where you can get all sorts of excellent insights and news from the industry. Again, thank you for joining us on the buzz. We’ll see you next time.
