Empowering Investment Teams Through User-Friendly Tech and Low-Code Innovation
The investment management industry is embracing low-code/no-code (LCNC) and user-friendly tools to empower non-technical staff, automate operations, and foster innovation. With intuitive design, self-service tools, and seamless integrations, firms gain a competitive edge by enabling internal teams to build, iterate, and solve business challenges faster and more effectively.
Throughout the fourth industrial revolution, we’ve been hearing how digital technologies will make our work lives easier with speed, automation, and efficiency. Silicon Valley stepped up to capitalize on the opportunity with entrepreneurs launching thousands of SaaS solutions and applications.
User-friendly technology has always been a premium in the investment industry, enabling analysts, accountants, risk teams, and portfolio managers to work smarter and more efficiently. Now, the development process itself is becoming further democratized with low-code/no-code tools and generative AI (GenAI), which, when paired with LCNC platforms, can help firms align software development with their business goals.
Firms deploying intuitive, customizable tools that understand user workflows are positioning themselves to solve unique business problems and foster a culture of innovation. Empowering business users requires software applications to work exactly the way the user needs. The challenge lies in ensuring technology is both sophisticated and genuinely user-friendly.
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What’s driving the growth of low-code/no-code in financial services?
In a 2023 Forrester survey, 37% of developers in financial services and insurance voiced the need to empower departmental IT with LCNC apps while 54% of pro developers in financial services said their firm has or is working on a citizen developer strategy. And that was in 2023.
A December 2024 research study found that low code is being used in the financial services sector more than any other industry and specifically to develop customer-facing applications, enhance process automation, and strengthen regulatory compliance through quick modifications. Yet, research from Private Equity Wire based on a survey of 100+ private market fund managers found that 54% of respondents still view data management in their day-to-day operations as “a work in progress” or “lacking.”
Good UI/UX is emerging as a key differentiator for firms evaluating investment technology solutions. For example, buyers are more likely to choose platforms that deliver both functionality and well-designed interfaces. Why? Because they don’t want their teams struggling to use clunky applications or discovering that the new tool hinders productivity rather than enhances it.
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Closing the transformation gap
Digital transformation initiatives tend to underachieve for several reasons, not the least of which is because staff will go out of their way to avoid using it. This could be matters of natural resistance to trying something new, inadequate training, miscommunication, or simply because a tool is too difficult to use.
The results from two surveys, in 2013 and again in 2023, of 300 large companies by Bain & Company reinforce the sentiment that global transformation initiatives are missing the mark. Despite significant attention to transformation, the numbers remained unchanged from one decade to the next. Only 12% of companies said their programs “met or exceeded expectations.” In 2013, one in every two companies said they “settled for mediocre results” — defined as achieving more than 50% of their targets but less than 100% — while three-quarters of companies gave that assessment in 2023. Despite greater focus and investment, these numbers are trending in the wrong direction.
The gap between innovation and execution is helping to sharpen the focus on usability. As funds continue to pursue digital transformation that truly delivers, the bar for success is rising. Investors have come to expect more personalized and seamless digital experiences — and so have a firm’s in-house staff. When user experience falls short, firms risk undermining the return on their technology investments. Firms equipping their teams with user-friendly tools promote adoption and productivity in a way that aligns with their longer-term transformation goals.
Technology as a magnet for talent
Nowadays, intuitive interfaces are table stakes for both a firm’s clients and their in-house workforce. From answering one-off queries to conducting deep-dive analyses and executing routine business activities, a well-designed interface ensures internal users are functioning efficiently.
The new generation of talent, Millennials and Gen Z, is digitally native. Known for their comfort and fluency in using digital tools, talented young managers and analysts want to know the firms they work for have installed cutting-edge data and operational infrastructure.
The tech industry is characterized by intense competition and high demand for niche technical roles like data science, AI, and cybersecurity. Winning firms will give their people the technology and tools to succeed and automate tedious non-revenue generating tasks so they can focus on more high-value workflows. As an example, manually supporting the data ingestion and processing lifecycle takes a long time and is prone to error. Automation reduces the time expenditure of in-house teams to step in and resolve user queries.
Citizen developers empowered to innovate and iterate
With the best tech infrastructure and LCNC tools, firms spend less time on manual operational tasks and more time driving risk-adjusted returns. What’s more, firms are also better positioned to collaborate and innovate. High-volume funds need operations to be automated to avoid hiring a large team to manually support the investment lifecycle. They want to give ownership to departmental teams through self-service tooling.
Today, many LCNC platforms place an impetus on plug-and-play integration, application programming interfaces, and AI tools, making them more powerful, accessible, and efficient. “This bypasses the complexity and costliness of creating custom interfaces, and it facilitates seamless data flow between legacy and modern applications.” This can be a critical component empowering employees with self-service tooling that enables citizen developers to create data pipelines or leverage an existing library of data quality rules or even create their own rules. Internal users comfortable working with self-service, data-driven solutions will be positioned to solve client challenges and to generate their own insights.
Guiding principles for user-centric tools
User-centric products don’t just provide core functionality; the products understand your workflows and empower users to execute them independently. For example, a private market fund’s op person is often the first to receive incoming queries from internal investment teams, IR, and compliance, or external stakeholders like auditors and LPs. Instead of waiting a couple of days for a custom report from a data person, the operations person logs in, filters, sorts, analyzes, and visualizes their data exactly how they need to, and then produces the output.
Aside from providing core product capabilities, user-friendly tech tools employ some of the basic tenets of well-designed products: a uniform look and feel throughout the product, intuitive hierarchy with navigation that logically displays information, good accessibility, support for personalization, and much more. The bottom line is that good design understands the impact of frustrating UX and solves for its impact on productivity.
With well thought-out designs, these products can support users in their business workflows. As an example, a user whose daily responsibility involves reporting will greatly appreciate any tool that automates the data processing lifecycle and lets them easily compile analytics. This brings a level of growth to the specific end-user and contributes to overall scale for firms.
Why UI/UX matters more than ever
LCNC solutions, cloud-native platforms, and open architecture empower users to collaborate, innovate, and increase productivity. Investment management technology that combines intuitive self-service capabilities with advanced reporting, automation, and low-code tools can elevate a firm’s brand reputation among talented investment pros, investors, and across the industry.
Everybody in the financial markets ecosystem wants to be nimble in the face of market uncertainty and volatility.
LCNC is a strategic direction that can cultivate excellent internal and external UX, ingenuity, and agility across an organization. Citizen developers may help ease the burden of trying to recruit developers with financial markets expertise and retaining high-performing investment professionals.
Key takeaways
1: What’s fueling the demand for low-code/no-code in investment firms?
A need for speed, automation, and agility in developing solutions, combined with a growing reliance on departmental IT, drives LCNC adoption across financial services.
2: How does intuitive UI/UX impact adoption of investment tech?
User-friendly interfaces reduce resistance, improve training uptake, and encourage consistent use, ultimately boosting ROI on digital transformation efforts.
3: How does tech affect hiring and retention in investment management?
Advanced tools attract and retain top talent by eliminating tedious tasks, enhancing productivity, and allowing employees to focus on strategic initiatives.
4: What role do citizen developers play in innovation?
They enable rapid prototyping and iteration, democratize app creation, and bridge IT-department gaps with self-service capabilities tailored to business needs.
5: What makes a user-centric tool effective in this space?
Tools that align with workflows, provide visual clarity, and prevent errors while offering customization and automation empower users across departments.
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