The rate at which businesses are able to satisfy their customers’ needs depends largely on how quickly they’re able to adapt their offerings. And whether the business is large or small, there are always going to be a variety of obstacles to overcome when igniting such a change.
This is an idea that has been developed and detailed at length throughout this guest post for The Fintech Times, which was authored by Sidetrade‘s Chief Product Officer, Rob Harvey.
Here, Rob discusses the use of no-code development tools in building minimum viable products, for both established businesses and SMEs, and how changes to the use and adoption of technology is continuing to cause disruption in the fintech market.
Traditional businesses in mature markets and start-ups disrupting industries by creating new markets have much more in common than you might think. They are both challenged with adapting to their customer’s continuously changing and demanding needs. The speed of technological change is racing ahead at breakneck speed, and the secret ingredients for success are finding the perfect product-market fit before it’s needed rather than reacting to it.
To hit the ground running, teams must adopt a more agile and lean approach to software development. But there is no such thing as a one size fits all solution. For example, many have made the mistake of thinking outsourcing will enable them to deliver double the amount of work in record time while also cutting their costs by 50%. But we all know how this story of unrealistic expectations ends.
New start-ups prefer to be much closer to their project. They need the freedom and flexibility to iterate, pivot, or change as required. These unique circumstances can make outsourcing much more challenging for start-up founders. By contrast, mature organisations are often armed with the tools to integrate an outsourced development team. They will have the experience needed to manage the impact on internal teams and stakeholders across the business.
How Technology Is Leading the Agile Revolution in Financial Services
The surge in popularity of enables businesses to build minimum viable products (MVPs) or complex applications without an expensive team of developers. The result is a faster and more agile way of building and launching new solutions that were not possible a few years ago without considerable expense and time constraints.
These tools are also empowering experienced developers to deliver solutions much faster. The simplicity of these tools will ensure that low-code and no-code development frameworks will become mainstream solutions quicker than many realise. Here in 2021, teams will be dipping their toes in the water by creating and improving internal applications. But what happens next could transform entire industries.
As teams gain more experience combined with the speed of delivering new solutions will become impossible for business leaders to ignore. Confidence will then enable non-technical teams to directly build apps for their customers. But this is only the beginning, and the evolution (or revolution) in the global financial services industry is just getting started.
The Challenges Ahead
Although no-code frameworks will deliver many benefits, there will also be a few obstacles that will need to be overcome during the adoption phase. The dynamics and culture for many organisations will need an entirely different approach. Self-sustaining; product teams will build MVP products and deliver solutions directly to customers without the help of development and IT teams.
This structure is managed holistically and needs to be thought about very carefully before moving fast and breaking things. It’s not the end of the road for development teams, their role will be more critical than ever, but their work will need to evolve and adapt to a new landscape. For example, instead of building new products and solutions from the ground up, they will focus on improving existing prototypes.
The biggest challenge for organisations will be how they manage their legacy systems. Many will have a bloated application estate and systems that have been neglected or not received any investment in decades. It won’t be cost-effective to re-engineer these legacy systems, but equally, you won’t be able to retire them until they can be replaced by something better. Once again, budget and time constraints will mean these systems will be around for much longer than many will care to admit.
A New Financial Landscape
Every aspect of how we send, receive, store, spend and invest money is being transformed by the agile revolution in Fintech. We already have a hybrid industry where traditional financial services from our former analog world and technological innovation have changed the economic landscape forever.
However, the revolution is just getting started. There is a possibility that software and artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually automate the re-engineering of legacy systems. Many businesses are also closely following how AI automated code solutions can generate code themselves.
Several years from now, we might look back on the time we wasted wrestling with the complexities that came with coding errors and defects when developing complex software. Self-coding apps will continue to help the winning combination of AI and machine learning to move further into many other areas and further fuel the agile revolution in Fintech.
The adoption of agile development is increasingly becoming critical for businesses playing catch-up on their digital transformation journey. Although it might feel that the speed of change is moving too fast, there is also an increasing realisation that it will never move this slow again. These are just a few reasons why every organisation should be preparing for the agile development revolution in their industry, sooner rather than later.
