Financial Services Data and Analytics Newsletter | July 2023

1. Rapid prototyping and iterations: Rapid development of proof of concept, minimum viable products and prototypes allows users to realise the feasibility of their ideas and ensures that they work as intended. Traditional methods allow businesses to take decisions after the application launch. Using LCNC platforms, these decisions can be made at a much faster pace in comparison to the traditional approach. Moreover, users can quickly evaluate their ideas without significant investment, making this more cost effective.
2. Increased productivity and collaboration: Developers can build libraries of reusable assets that can be leveraged across multiple projects, saving time and effort in recreating the same functionality. These platforms allow a collaborative development environment, thus enabling teams to work parallelly. Such a platform enhances productivity as it fastens the application development cycles, streamlines processes and empowers citizen developers to build applications.
3. Scalability and maintenance: Many LCNC platforms are cloud based, thus allowing users to scale up or down based on demand, while ensuring optimal performance and usage. Elastic resource allocation ensures that the necessary computing power, storage and bandwidth are available as the application is scaled up further. Furthermore, the platform allows developers to monitor the application performance, track usage patterns and identify bottlenecks. The platforms are centralised and version-controlled by vendors who are responsible for adding new features, improving performance, addressing vulnerabilities and fixing bugs in order to optimise and maintain them.
4. Integration and automation: LCNC platform offers seamless integration with existing systems and databases, thus allowing companies to leverage their existing infrastructure and integrate with other applications, ensuring smooth data flow and interoperability. Some platforms can be integrated with AI and ML technologies, which can help integrate intelligent automation capabilities like predictive analysis and image recognition into applications.

LCNC platforms have the potential to transform industries and domains across the globe. These platforms can reduce the pressure on software developers and turn rapidly changing business requirements into sustainable and continuous integration and delivery pipelines. We’ve highlighted the impact of using these platforms below:

1. Customer experience: Enhanced customer experience helps an organisation to stand out from its competitors. With the help of the LCNC platforms, departments like customer care, sales and marketing can develop applications to handle client complaints, provide a personalised selling experience and perform customer analysis to provide a seamless experience across all customer touchpoints. 
2. Faster time to market: Enterprise application development can be accelerated with LCNC platforms. Web-based drag-and-drop features, reusable components, built-in libraries and templates speed up the development of applications. This enables organisations to launch their apps faster and make modifications swiftly, which results in an increased revenue and market share, enhanced customer satisfaction, improved agility, adaptability to market trends and cost saving. However, before choosing any LCNC platform, organisations should thoroughly assess its flexibility, extensibility, customisable features and options related to vendor lock-ins.
3. Addressing resource scarcity: Organisations are struggling to acquire and retain the right technological capabilities and talent pool. With LCNC platforms, citizen developers equipped with in-depth domain knowledge can now build IT applications like websites, apps and interactive dashboards. This saves time and also serves business requirements promptly, allowing the workforce to upskill and cross-skill with minimal effort, thereby resulting in fewer recruitments.
4. Empowering citizen developers: The drag and drop facility of LCNC platforms empowers citizen developers to create customer applications. This bridges the gap between business needs and IT capabilities, fostering innovation and reducing the backlog of development requests. As it enables the workforce to create its own solutions, this technology is expected to improve process efficiencies and fulfil stakeholders’ expectations in time.
5. Democratising technology: LCNC platforms democratise technology by making it available to a wider audience by removing entry barriers and enabling users to create their own applications and automate processes – without relying too much on developers and external vendors.
6. Establishing of an LCNC community: Many developers might not perceive supporting LCNC platforms as a wise career choice. Therefore, organisations should encourage the creation of LCNC communities where business users can receive training from IT professionals. As making the community self-reliant is necessary for sustaining the adoption of LCNC platforms, organisations will have to meticulously design programmes to encourage and upskill their citizen developers.
7. Fostering a culture of innovation: It is important for organisations to foster a culture of innovation and agility that cuts across departmental silos. They must encourage experimentation by allowing citizen developers to test their ideas, learn from setbacks and improve their skills. Moreover, a growth mindset can be promoted by celebrating successes, rewarding innovation, providing constructive feedback and sharing best practices.

1. User interface (UI): The LCNC architecture encompasses an intuitive UI which allows developers to visually create and customise their apps or workflows. Users may arrange components on a canvas and configure their characteristics, enabling the UI to provide an assortment of activities.
2. Development of applications and workflow: Users can establish data links to access and retrieve data from databases, APIs and other systems. The platform manages the data integration process and offers tools visually for data processing, modelling and mapping. In addition, users may create conditional statements, decision trees, business rules and processes. Actions, triggers and notifications may all be configured using visual tools.
3. Vast library and customisation: An LCNC platform comes with a collection of pre-configured components that users can choose from. These can include UI elements, data connectors, automation tools and analytics widgets. Once these components are on canvas, users can configure and customise according to their needs using a visual interface that allows them to set properties, data bindings, conditional behaviours and other parameters without writing any code.
4. Execution and deployment: Users can easily design and configure applications workflow on the LCNC platform. Depending on the configuration, the platform will generate the necessary code or script. Applications can be easily deployed on web or mobile platforms, and workflow can be executed on a platform with the click of a button.
5. Integration and extensibility: An LCNC platform can be easily integrated with APIs, third-party applications and cloud service providers. It can easily be integrated with other systems or services, accelerating the flow of information and reducing huge operational costs.

Traditional approach vs LCNC platform

The FS industry is highly regulated and any amendment in regulations needs to be incorporated by companies in a stipulated amount of time. The flexibility and ease of use offered by LCNC platforms has well served the need of FS industry, enabling it to build applications swiftly to meet customer expectations. Applications such as customer relationship management, loan originator system, expense management system, investment portfolio management, risk management system, claim processing system and payment processing system have been extensively implemented using LCNC platforms.

LCNC platform providers

LCNC platforms, in many aspects, will soon become citizen developers’ first choice to co-innovate and build dashboards, internal workflows and streamline processes. They will enable developers to swiftly build a proof of concept to validate their ideas and develop applications. Standalone applications with low-to-medium complexity can be easily developed and deployed by citizen developers. However, for building complex applications – such as ERP systems and 360 platforms – citizens would require assistance from IT personnel for integration, customisation, security and deployment. Application development time can be reduced from years to months/weeks, depending upon the complexity. The traditional way of building applications requires a steep learning curve and proficiency in programming. However, building applications using the LCNC platform is intuitive and user-friendly.

A thorough assessment of applications required by stakeholders and their usability is essential to select the most suitable platform for the decided requirements. FS companies should opt for a specialised BFSI LCNC platform as most of the essential features are available in the form of drag and drop components, while complying with the regulatory and security norms. The platform that allows developers to debug the code behind the visual interface, will help them understand the logic embedded inside the components, thus allowing them to customise, reuse and make the platform more accessible. Moreover, timely backup of data is required to avoid vendor lock-in crises in future. To promote use of LCNC platforms, organisations must foster the growth of the citizen developer community – enabling innovation, rapid application development and responsiveness in order to stay ahead in the market.

Erie Insurance is a leading Fortune 500 insurance company in the US. Their existing customer portal had been mobile-responsive for a long time. However, recently the team had identified the need to build native iOS and Android applications to fulfil the requirements and improve the digital customer experience. The company has not employed any mobile-specific developers. Hence, they found a solution to quickly execute their requirements using existing resources and build a native application via the Mendix platform. This allowed the company to focus on offering their consumers with functionalities like making payments or viewing ID cards. Using the platform, the quoting cycle for commercial accounts was reduced from two days to about ten minutes, and the quote/bind cycle was reduced from 3–5 days to less than an hour.