Andie Dovgan, Chief Growth Officer at Creatio
The finance industry has been spearheading the digital revolution. First came another wave of digital transformation, with 74% of legacy banks attempting to accelerate digital transformations in 2023 to increase sales, reduce customer complaints, and reduce the cost of frontline staff, per 10x Banking. Now comes the onset of no-code development and generative AI (Gen AI), with Gartner anticipating that 70% of new applications will be developed using no-code technologies by 2025, and also predicting that Gen AI use cases will touch everything from forecast and budget variances to management and regulatory reporting.
With each successive wave of new technology, CFOs are expected to keep up with advancements. Naturally, the first solution is to bring in external IT consultants for support – but this approach is expensive and often disrupts internal operations.
Instead, CFOs are starting to take technology into their own hands.
No-code platforms turn non-techies into developers
The modern CFO now doubles as a citizen developer, i.e., a non-IT professional who creates applications with no-code platforms.
No-code platforms have been on the rise in recent years, with companies leveraging the technology to empower their non-technical staff to build business applications and automate complex workflows. With a no-code platform at their fingertips, even non-techies can assemble various components, blocks, and apps to create business processes and solutions that fulfil unique requirements—no coding required. The benefits have been abundant, helping teams not only simplify development processes and increase organisational capacity but also spur rapid prototyping, accelerate development timelines, and reduce costs.
Still, the ubiquity of no-code platforms is relatively new. Historically, the tools were limited to lightweight, front-end applications; although advances recently have led them to being deemed sufficient for mission-critical enterprise solutions. What’s different?
The addition of Gen AI.
Gen AI boosts no-code capabilities
GenAI has quickly become renowned for its ability to create content from simple textual prompts. Now, it can also serve as a powerful enhancer for no-code tools.
While traditional no-code platforms provide non-developers with visual drag-and-drop tools, new Gen AI-enabled no-code tools take things a step further, making application development faster, simplified, and more intuitive. For example, instead of requiring a professional developer to create an entire application from scratch, citizen developers can use prompts to ask a Gen AI-powered no-code platform to create a template of their desired solution.
For CFOs who want to speed up projects’ time-to-market and keep up with fast-moving technology changes, this combination of Gen AI and no-code platforms is a saving grace. And the business benefits are already proving immense.
Faster prototyping and application development are obvious immediate advantages. No-code automation dramatically speeds up the ideation-to-realisation phase by instantly translating user descriptions into components, templates, or holistic applications. This accelerated development enables more efficient decision-making, further streamlining workflows and increasing teams’ productivity as they strive to meet shifting industry demands.
No-code automation also helps teams realise new capabilities and use cases, unlocking enhanced features that were otherwise only accessible via sophisticated software suites, such as AI-powered, human-like conversational responses, predictive insights, and historical data analysis. For the financial services industry, in particular, the opportunities for no-code automation are plentiful, including automation for banks, customer engagement solutions, partner relationship management systems, etc.
A no-code future for everyone
If CFOs want to usher in a new era of software development that will completely redefine current business operational frameworks, they must remain flexible and approach this technological evolution with strategic planning, testing, and IT protocol adherence. Onboarding the right platform and supporting employees with education will also be key in mitigating risks and maximising benefits.
And while CFOs become citizen developers and take on new roles in technology deployment, no-code platforms will free professional developers from routine tasks so they can focus their time and effort on bigger innovations that contribute to the development of emerging technologies and maximise business benefit.
In this way, perhaps the most significant impact of no-code platforms will be the democratisation of software development. By giving CFOs and other non-technical workers the tools to create new business processes and participate in application development, no-code platforms let everyone harness the power of technology, spurring teams to not only keep up with industry changes but lead the way into a new future of digital innovation that’s more inclusive and collective than ever before.