A well-known saying goes, “If you want something done right, do it yourself”. This is easier said than done when the desired outcome is not easy to accomplish – especially if you don’t know how – because it requires a specialized skillset and expertise, like coding.

Technological advancements continue to soar through industries and disturb the status quo of functions and operations, revealing redundant data and archaic processes as businesses strive to embrace digital innovation. Low-code and no-code technologies are helping firms overcome these challenges as an alternative, low-entry path to building custom solutions, and accelerating digital transformation. According to Red Hat, low-code platforms can reduce app development time by 90%¹.

Low-code tools enable faster application programming powered by visual interfaces, while no-code platforms simplify building products without needing to write any code. Gartner forecasts that the low-code, no-code platform market will grow almost 20% to $12.3 billion in 2024².

The recent popularization of low-code, no-code can be attributed to platforms that make it easy to self-build and customize applications. Another contributing factor is the reduced dependency on professional developers. Low-code, no-code technology is giving rise to citizen developers by placing powerful tools in the hands of non-technical business users, and vesting teams and individuals to digitize processes, automate workflows, and eliminate operational inefficiencies.

Emergence & effect

In 2008, electronic invitation or, e-invitation, sites such as Paperless Post and Evite, disrupted the traditional paper-based invite service – some will agree in a good way, for their substantial influence on environmental waste reduction. Once the norm for inviting guests to an event, paper-based invitations are now a novelty, with more invitations being sent online than ever before. E-invitations are easy to create, and the digital, D-I-Y element offers playful exploration.

Synonymous with no-code technology, electronic invitation sites feature an embedded self-customization tool with hundreds of templates to choose from so that you don’t have to think about font, color, images, or layout. Basic options are often free, attracting a wider audience and furthering its appeal – driving customers to not only play with the functionality, but also spur creativity, and accelerate adoption.

Online invitation tools don’t just replace paper invitations, they digitize the entire guest management workflow from creating and distributing invitations, and tracking RSVPs, to sending post-event thank you notes – eliminating the need for expensive design services, trips to the post office and your mailbox.

Along with the significant effect on sustainability, low-code, no-code is also breaking down barriers for women in technology. In the U.S., women hold a mere 26.7% of tech-related roles³, but low-code, no-code is evolving the tech landscape for women by providing tools to innovate solutions more efficiently, and spearhead digitization efforts.

Early 2000s web developers coded with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to create a web site, preceding the advent of (then Macromedia, now Adobe) Dreamweaver. Predating the low-code, no-code era, Dreamweaver was an early iteration of low-code technology, arming users with WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) tools to relinquish full HTML scripting, and visually define the layout and appearance of websites. Dreamweaver has since been substituted for even easier-to-use, no-code category tools, such as Wix, offering pre-built templates, an array of reusable interactive elements, and plug-and-play integration to other apps and services.

Present-day problems

Fast forward to today, non-technical folks globally are creating custom products and mobile applications by simply dragging and dropping elements, and specifying colors and layouts with no coding, or any scripting language, at all.

For firms, gone are the days of solely relying on professional developers with coding skills to build out customized solutions over long development cycles. Low-code, no-code absolves recruitment efforts and associated costs, and accelerates time-to-market for tailored products to solve a customer challenge or meet a business need.

Financial services firms, however, are still hampered by legacy applications, detached systems, and data silos. Coupled with the current surges in data volumes across disparate systems, these firms are in desperate need of cohesive solutions for managing data sources, consolidating data, making the same data available across different functions, and deriving insights for real-time analyses.

Out with the old, in with the new

The demand for modernizing legacy systems and democratizing data has never been higher. Built on the premise of low-code, no-code, Arcesium’s sophisticated technology, Aquata^®, provides the foundation for your firm’s digitization journey with configurable data ingestion, self-service data aggregation, data lineage, and analytics capabilities.

Aquata equips business users with an arsenal of tools to forgo coding, and capitalize on a modern, graphical user interface (GUI) to efficiently craft data pipelines and transform data for downstream operations.

Aquata’s Graphical Interface to Create Data Pipelines