Microsoft predicts there will be more than 500 million apps created in the next decade, thanks to no-code development solutions.

“Citizen developers will be able to drag and drop stuff and build no-code databases,” Salah Khawaja, managing director of automation and global risk at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, told audiences at the AI Business Week Symposium in February. “You can build no-code forms. You can build no-code websites. You can do no-code [artificial intelligence]. This is going to be this massive revolution that we’re going to see over the next five to 10 years.”

For now, though, most solutions focus on low-code, which incorporates tools for developers, rather than no-code development. Bank Automation News spoke with experts and practitioners about the automations low-code solutions can deliver for banks today.

Recent adoption of low code

Low code is nothing new. It goes back to the 1990s, at least, but is now enjoying renewed interest, in part due to COVID and more remote programming work, according to IT research firm Gartner. In fact, low-code development will total $13.8 billion in 2021, an increase of 22.6% from 2020, according to Gartner’s prediction.

Appian, a low-code development and automation platform founded in 1999, was the first low-code vendor to offer an IPO in 2017. And since then, the company has seen year-over-year growth of 30% on what CEO Michael Beckley described as “a pretty large baseline.” Appian is considered a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for enterprise low-code application platforms; competitors include Microsoft, Mendix, Outsystems and Salesforce. It should be noted, however, that these are all low-code application development platforms; other types of solutions also offer low-code options. For instance, robot process automation (RPA) or AI solutions can also be low code.

Appian’s customer base includes most of the major banks, Beckley said, although he declined to specify which ones. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a massive acceleration in adoption. In particular, banks used low-code automations to quickly stand up Paycheck Protection Project (PPP) application solutions last year, Beckley said.

“They were able to do it in 24 hours in many cases, without even asking for our help, because their developers were already enabled and they had that expertise,” Beckley said. “You’re building a new process fast, a new workflow that can be constantly improved and optimized and changed as the regulation changes, as the needs change.”

Low code for reduced risk at Options Clearing Corporation

Options Clearing Corporation is an Appian customer that went low code in 2015. The Chicago-based OCC is the world’s largest equity derivatives clearinghouse, said Bill Raczyk, the vice president of process innovation at OCC.

“What we’re facing was a lot of regulations that it came about almost 10 years ago,” Raczyk said. “There was a lot more focus on clearinghouses and their structures. We took a hard look and tried to fine-tune all that we did within the organization. And we identified an opportunity to reduce risk in a lot of our processes by taking out as many manual steps as possible.”

Low code allowed OCC to accomplish that automation goal more quickly than traditional software solutions, Raczyk said, and the clearinghouse currently has 20 low-code applications in use.

“We instituted a program, about a year ago now, where we can actually build an application in a day. But it has to be a pretty lightweight application,” Raczyk said. For more rigorous solutions, OCC uses agile development, which means continuously delivering functional code in short intervals of three to four weeks, and goes through the whole software development lifecycle.

Most recently, OCC used Appian to fully automate the production of information memos, which were previously created as Word documents, turned into PDFs, then posted. Now, the team does the work of creating and reviewing the memos in one app, which automatically pushes out a PDF to the OCC’s externally facing website.

“Low code works really well for us, particularly the platform that we’re building on has a lot of functionality,” Raczyk said. However, he is skeptical that no-code solutions can deliver that same functionality. “Quite honestly, there’s this term, ‘no code.’ I’d love to see it actually work. I don’t know if no code really can deliver a whole lot in terms of an enterprise.”

Low code for speed at Citizens Commercial

Joanne Wyper, the head of operations at the $183.3 billion Citizens Commercial Bank, has been using low-code automation since 2017, along with robotic process engineering, data workflows and orchestration. As a business leader, rather than a technologist, she appreciates the speed and simplicity of low-code solutions and appreciates that she no longer has to beg for resources and funds from the IT department.

“If I can use low code and rapidly deploy these benefits to a client within a matter of weeks, I’m going to take that option,” Wyper said. “We’ve been able to say, ‘Give us very sensible technology-savvy people; they may not sit in the technology department, it is low code.’ Very quickly, we can develop them, train them and, within weeks, we’re changing the client experience. That, for me, is a game-changer.”

Wyper estimates the bank removed 7.5 billion keystrokes out of its operations in a year and a half. That speed is one reason low-code and no-code automations are being adopted so rapidly now, said Dave Donelan, a senior vice president at SkillStorm, a talent agency that offers technical training.

“That’s why we’re seeing such a growth in the low code, no code space — the speed in which these applications can be developed is so much faster than traditional coding,” Donelan said. “With most organizations enveloping digital transformation, they need to get these applications built and quickly, and that’s why the smart ones have started to adopt — if not a full — a hybrid model.”

For Wyper, it helped to have an operational database team to repurpose for low-code programming. It took only three to four months for the Citizens Bank team to become qualified to use its low-code solution, which she declined to name.

Leveraging low code to grow business at Wells Fargo

Low code isn’t just a development platform option for banks to leverage; it can also be a tool for expanding business. Wells Fargo & Co. recently released a software development kit that allows business partners to embed the credit card application process in their own apps with very little coding. The development kit won the Celent Model Bank 2021 Award for Embedded Finance.

Originally, Wells Fargo was simply offering an API so that partners could build their own interface and workflows, Imran Haider, executive vice president of open banking at the $1.96 trillion bank, told BAN. Then the San Francisco, Calif.-based bank was asked by a partner to build the front-end interface as a widget so the partner bank could drop it into its app interface and “skin” it with its own branding. An API connects this widget to Wells Fargo. The partner doesn’t even see the data the customer enters — it all flows directly to Wells Fargo.

The plan is to expand low-code automations at Wells Fargo using the same approach for other financial products, such as opening a checking or savings account or acquiring a loan, Haider said.

Low-code flexibility for PPP

One of the benefits of low-code development is its flexibility, Appian’s Beckley said. Users can visually drag and drop the interface builder, so a change in requirements does not require a change in the code.

This came in handy when the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) requirements changed daily during the PPP application window. At one point, the SBA site was overwhelmed by loan applications and shut down acceptance of submissions from RPA bots. The many banks using RPA to automate the PPP loan process found themselves cut off from submitting applications, Beckley said.

Meanwhile, the SBA continued to accept API-based submissions, which is what low-code providers like Appian used for integration. It should be noted there are low-code options for building RPA, however, few RPA providers at the time offered limited API integration support

“But it just it goes to the point … low code is not just a new way to write software, it is a new way to think about automation,” Beckley said.

To that end, banks are also using low-code solutions to automate the large-scale onboarding of new customers, as well as automating in risk and compliance for know your customer and anti-money laundering guidelines, Beckley said.

“The other thing with low code from vendors, like Appian, is it can actually scale from the most complex processes to the simplest,” Beckley said. “When I say ‘connected onboarding,’ I’m talking about institutional onboarding, where you’re talking about billions of dollars in accounts that need to be funded, and incredibly complicated interactions between legal teams over the contracts and asset management firms and the custodians of those assets.”

Beckley said situations that are good for low code include: frequent process changes; customer onboarding; workflows that integrate different automation techniques; and business rules that require human oversight.

No-go for low code

While low-code automation simplifies coding through drag-and-drop interfaces, it still requires a developer for this work. Developers can become proficient in a couple of weeks, faster than it would take to learn a new programming language, Beckley said.

But even Beckley acknowledges there are situations where the low-code solution isn’t the right solution. If a system doesn’t change, or won’t change for a long time, it may not be cost-effective to implement it. He pointed to the U.S. Census system as an example; it was built with low code but is only used every 10 years.

Low code has other drawbacks, according to Ivan Kot, director of customer acquisition and a solution consultant at Itransition Group, a Lakewood, Colo.-based software development company. Kot recently wrote about some of his concerns in a column for Jaxenter, a website for developers, noting that integration, vendor lock-in, and too much customization can be challenging for low-code solutions.

However, low-code solutions can be great for business analysts or team managers who need to streamline processes or build an app with simple logic to “solve minor tasks within a project or a company,” Kot told BAN. “As a rule, challenges come up when professional developers are tasked with using low-code platforms. They get frustrated when they don’t have an option to switch to a code editor but have to spend time choosing elements and conditions where they could just write a line of code,” Kot added.

That said, SkillStorm’s Donelan cautioned that a technical background is helpful for anyone using low-code solutions. “It always helps to have an IT background, be grounded in that kind of technical mindset,” Donelan said.

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.