When developing digital applications to streamline processes, financial services companies often hit delays when dealing with complex application comparisons. No-code makes this much simpler.
The financial services industry was founded on a paper-based application process, and many banks today still rely heavily on paper and manual methods of operation. To open a bank account, for example, a prospective customer must fill out a form that will be scanned, faxed, and processed through the back office. It is a tedious, inefficient process that opens up opportunities for human error.
To make things worse, the nature of banking isn’t compatible with predominantly manual operations. Details like current income, home address, and contact information are continuously changing for every customer, which means that modifications are common but also much more difficult than they should be. If an employee needs to update client information, they must go back through various scanned forms and manually make any required changes.
Things get even more complicated when we start to discuss legacy systems. As companies in the financial services industry begin to make efforts to digitize, they’ll need to deal with complex comparison engines to logically parse through old and new information and ensure that information is up-to-date. Since comparisons happen so frequently in banking applications, it’s important for financial services companies of all sizes to have an efficient way of handling this. No-code offers banks the flexibility and scalability needed to execute complex application comparisons painlessly.
Challenges in Using Code for Application Comparisons
Comparisons are especially difficult to code with traditional development languages because application comparisons often require negotiating variables that do not exist within the app. When dealing with legacy databases, migrating data using code would require digging deep into each individual workflow, table, and data structure to change every instance of an old variable. This would mean manually editing millions of lines of code, which could easily take upwards of two months for just one variable.
Take an example financial services provider looking to transition from an entirely paper-based system to a digital app. Digital applications that handle a large number of clients rely heavily on unique IDs, which are specific identifiers used to tag transactions as they pass through various systems. Unique IDs allow users to easily pinpoint a particular client or transaction and create consistency across systems.
This company was a unique case in that they did not initially use unique IDs — in the U.S., unique IDs are typically represented by social security numbers, but Canadians do not receive social insurance numbers until the age of 18. As a result, certain changes — like removing a child from a beneficiaries list — would lead to incorrect comparisons in the app.
If developers had tried to solve these inconsistencies by defining a new unique ID using code, they would have to declare a variable and rename the unique ID individually in millions of individual instances to specify what you’re comparing the unique ID to. This would be the equivalent of months of work, regardless of whether you’re dealing with minor edits or fundamental changes. And when you have to do this with multiple variables, the work is multiplicative — you not only have an exponential increase in the individual lines you need to change, but also an exponential amount of debugging.
Although this was a specific case, there are any number of occasions in banking applications that might call for either defining a new variable or redefining an existing one. As Manulife and many other financial services providers have realized, the process of moving away from a headache-inducing paper process can often create new headaches of its own. Moving to a digital application should be as straightforward as possible so that companies can begin reaping the benefits of digital applications. There needs to be a simpler way to build complex application comparisons than with traditional code.
Streamlining Application Comparisons With No-Code
When you go to build the same comparisons with no-code, you’re handed a built-in way to configure comparisons that get replicated across the database. What would take millions of line edits with code takes one single line of comparison with no-code. That single line gets carried out throughout the application, automating an incredibly tedious process for you.
This configuration-based method means that Manulife was able to implement a unique ID across their application in two days as opposed to two months. Essentially, no-code enables you to build one data workflow in less than a tenth of the time it would take to manually code one comparison. Solving Manulife’s dilemma using no-code is as easy as removing one node from the data workflow and replacing it with a unique ID or account number, ensuring integrity between application comparisons.
In applications where there are complex comparisons and multiple workflows, developers should spend more time focusing on the logic involved and less time bogged down with tedious line changes. No-code frees up developer time with dynamic, simple, and visual processes.
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