With most financial services employees now working from home, one challenge that is having a profound effect on productivity is decreased collaboration. Modern communication tools and video calls have been indispensable, but the distributed nature of today’s workforce is resulting in teams struggling to work together to solve business and customer issues.

Because of the accelerated pace of digital transformation and new unique customer scenarios caused by the pandemic, this lack of collaboration is particularly damaging as there is a more urgent need to roll out new services faster than ever or change existing processes at the drop of a hat.

What’s more, IT teams who would normally be on hand to assist with these demands are preoccupied with pressing tasks, such as moving assets to the cloud and securing the remote workforce who are under fire from an unprecedented level of cyber-attacks. Quite simply, IT teams do not have time to respond to more trivial requests. It’s time for low-code to step in and support financial services workers through this period of change and boost teamwork.

Employees will reap the rewards

Technology teams in banks are under pressure, so ramping up the use of low-code will help keep colleagues off their back. Citizen developers – employees who create new business applications for use by others using a low-code platform – will have the opportunity to amend business applications on their own. Low-code allows citizen developers to develop and improve easy to use case management and collaboration applications.

Low-code also means business users, developers and IT can collaborate, innovate, and deliver critical applications from one inclusive environment – so organisations can build apps faster and smarter. Low-code application development platforms allow business and IT to collaborate in real-time, using visual models to capture business requirements, quickly iterate and scale apps while ensuring nothing gets lost in translation.

This collaboration facilitated by low-code can also bring extensive gains in productivity and have the knock-on effect of increasing customer satisfaction through greater speed and simplicity across a range of bank products, therefore promising significant value through enhanced revenues and reduced costs.

For example, banks can use a low-code platform to combine data from tens of internal systems to build a single customer view, the result being more efficient call centre operations. And not just to surface the data, but to take action through an agent, partially or fully automate and then update back into those existing systems.

Customers will see the benefits

With the continued shrinkage of bank branch networks and the world shifting to a digital-first economy, enhancing digital self-service capabilities is the top priority for banks in 2021, according to research from Celent. With consumer needs changing all the time, citizen developers need to be armed with the technology to adapt their self-service tools very quickly. Teams also need to work together so they determine the best way of serving each individual. Again, low-code can support here.

At the beginning of the pandemic, banks were under pressure to deliver COVID-19 relief to businesses around the world, and that pressure continues. Using low-code application development capabilities, employees at some financial institutions were able to come together to quickly adapt to these changes on the fly – from incremental adjustment to wholesale overhauls, effectively saving businesses around the world from financial difficulties brought about by the pandemic.

Obstacles for consideration

While the advantages are obvious, there are some factors to consider to ensure low-code development is successful.

First, banks need to make sure they use an agnostic low-code tool that can integrate with their existing applications. Each team across an organisation will have its own application preferences, so for true collaboration to be realised low-code must be possible across every team.

Second, due to the regulatory environment, the appropriate level of governance must be built in, so that any newly created applications or changes to existing ones are fully compliant and able to easily adapt to change.

A new age of low-code collaboration

To see how effective this strategy is, we only have to look at challenger brands such as Monzo and Starling. In the past, these digital-first disruptors have utilised low-code environments to push new versions of apps quickly. They have been able to add new capabilities and functionality based on customer requests. Now it’s time for traditional players to adopt a similar way of working.

Forrester analysts found that "enterprises that embraced low-code platforms, digital process automation, and collaborative work management reacted faster and more effectively than firms relying only on traditional development”. This is unsurprising as with an intuitive visual approach to application development, low-code applications enable better collaboration between business and IT, faster time to market, and lower costs.

If hybrid working continues for months, or even years to come, low-code will play a crucial role in boosting collaboration in the workplace, helping improve the end customer experience whilst contributing to significant cost saving. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.