Source | Laser Finance (leishecaijing)
Since the financial industry launched a comprehensive digital transformation, from the core system to the partial application, it is looking for the optimal solution of safety, efficiency and cost.
However, the requirements of digitalization on financial institutions are not only reflected in the level of technology application, but also internalized in the reconstruction of business models, that is, to change the previous business model that separates the front and back offices. This requires that technology research and development must be infinitely close to business scenarios, shorten the distance between IT and business, and change the traditional production relationship between upstream and downstream or Party A and Party B.
Judging from the current status of digitalization of financial institutions, most financial institutions are still unable to realize the integration of technology and business at the front end of the scene, and the efficiency of organizational management and business development is obviously insufficient. The root cause is that the traditional IT development model is not enough to cope with the complex business lines of financial institutions, the difficulty of internal and external management, and the rapid pace of business iteration.
At present, financial institutions must establish an agile development logic that adapts to the core system, use a more efficient, lower-cost, and lower-risk development model to complete the construction and iteration of applications and business systems, and improve operational efficiency. pushed to the extreme.
So, who can be the problem solver for financial institutions to achieve agile development and digital transformation?
"Low-code will become a must for the digital transformation of the financial industry." Huang Jie, vice president of Aozhe, told Laser Finance that the emergence of the low-code model has subverted the traditional development and collaboration model of financial institutions, empowering business teams with low technical thresholds Covering department-level long-tail application requirements, the domain model-driven model empowers professional developers to efficiently implement core business development.
Low-code reconstruction financial-level capabilities
In the public impression, even for front-line developers, low-code is simply dragging and dragging, which cannot be applied to scenarios with complex organizations and businesses. However, with the continuous iteration of product capabilities and the enrichment of application scenarios, low-code capabilities have been extended.
Currently, the capabilities of the low-code development platform can be summarized into the following three points:
First, it is easy to use and doubles the development efficiency. Unlike high-code development, low-code reduces the complexity of the development process, allowing developers with different experience levels to quickly build business applications through visual modeling and dragging and dropping components, reducing the time spent on repetitive and basic development work cost. According to Gartner, by 2024, 65% of application development activities will be done through low-code methods.
Second, strengthen the collaboration between the business side and the IT side. The Wall Street Journal published an article "It's Time to Get Rid of the IT Department" (It's Time to Get Rid of the IT Department), which pointed out that the organizational model of setting up a dedicated IT department in the existing company hinders the company's innovation and agility. , customer centricity and digital transformation. There are many reasons why the business department believes that the IT department does not respond to business needs, that the work results of the IT department cannot be linked to business performance, that IT cannot keep up with business changes and innovation needs, and so on.
The emergence of this kind of situation is actually related to the traditional development and business collaboration model of the enterprise: usually the business first puts forward the demand, and IT schedules and implements the demand according to the demand. However, due to the poor cognition and information between the two parties, the "departmental wall" also makes each other have different evaluation standards for task priority and importance. The result is that the demand is always "changing and changing" in the scheduling and process stages for many years. Go, can't decide" or the developed application does not match the actual demand, causing multiple losses of financial, material and human resources of the enterprise.
Low code bridges the gap between business and IT. On the one hand, its low-threshold feature allows business personnel to independently complete the construction of departmental applications in a drag-and-drop manner with simple training, without the need for professional technical knowledge. It is timely and efficient, and "self-built" applications are closer to actual business . By reducing the interference of scattered requirements, developers can focus more on the architecture construction and development of core business systems. On the other hand, domain model-driven low-code products allow IT personnel and business personnel to participate in system modeling, and carry out subsequent application development work on the basis of modeling. The two parties communicate based on the same "language" system, so collaboration is naturally more effective.
Third, agile development and independent innovation. The data shows that the low-code development platform can save at least 80% of the code volume, and can respond to changes in requirements quickly, so that research is development, development is deployment, and the cycle from demand to development to online deployment is greatly shortened.
For most domestic companies that lack mature experience, compared to purchasing large-scale digital systems at the outset, the cost is high and there is a risk that it will be difficult to adjust once mistakes are made. Instead, adopting a low-code approach is a better choice, which can greatly reduce the cost of trial and error, especially when exploring innovative businesses.
"The traditional development model needs to complete the work in a week, and the low-code development platform can usually do it in one day." Huang Jie said.
Take a leading domestic financial institution served by Aozhe as an example. In the past, after the business department put forward the demand, it took 1 to 3 months or even longer from demand analysis and demonstration, development, testing to launch; After the code platform, the entire cycle was shortened to about 1 week.
It can be said that the advantages of low-code functionality and ease of use already have the possibility to move towards the financial industry, the first echelon industry of China's digitalization.
It is understood that since its establishment in 2010, Aozhe has served many financial enterprises. However, the needs of early financial enterprises were more reflected in BPM (business process management), and the perception of agile development on the business side and the scene side was weak.
"But now the trend is obvious. Many financial customers have a surge in demand for agile development, and have switched to upgrade to use the low-code services provided by Aozhe."
Low-risk "capability portfolio" for agile development
After the capability is confirmed, another question that needs to be answered is: What exactly can low-code bring to the financial industry?
According to IDC data, more than one-third of Chinese financial companies have reached the high-level stage of digital transformation maturity: not only to a certain extent, they can meet the challenges of technology and talents faced by enterprises, and meet the dynamic needs of enterprise-level applications. , Improving the digital acuity and adaptability of financial enterprises to changes can also greatly enhance the democratization and universalization of application development.
However, for the vast majority of financial institutions, it is difficult to truly achieve full coverage of digitalization under the KPI pressure of faster response to market demand and regulatory requirements to fully promote digital transformation.
Among them, non-uniform development standards, repeated development and application iterations that cannot keep up with business changes are the first reasons that make it difficult to advance digitalization.
On the one hand, the financial industry is especially like a banking institution. Internal technology, security and other regulations and systems are highly complex. Business development must conform to the corresponding framework, and the underlying technology cannot be unified. Developers must put a lot of energy on the underlying platform technology, which eventually leads to their overweight development model, insufficient agility at the application level, long development cycle and very low efficiency.
On the other hand, under the business trend led by financial technology, digital transformation gradually penetrates from the front-end business side of financial institutions to the middle and back-end management operation and maintenance side. During this period, the digital transformation of comprehensive office management and business management has released a large number of long-tail and core development requirements, which put forward higher requirements for the development efficiency and operation and maintenance iteration efficiency of financial institutions. Difficult to deal with entirely by own IT team.
If you rely on technology outsourcing to respond to development needs, regardless of self-controllability and security issues, the mode of outsourcing development from business needs also has a long chain of communication problems, which may eventually lead to untimely delivery and unfinished application development.
In fact, due to special requirements such as supervision and compliance, the financial industry has strict internal control mechanisms for demand delivery, product design, and test deployment, so product development cycles are generally long. In order to shorten the cycle as a whole and improve the timeliness of digital iteration, improving the agility of development is the best entry point.
Low-code is guided by agile development, directly based on specific business scenarios, from the two dimensions of underlying technical standards and application expansion, and shortens the time for application requirements to go online from quarters to days.
Take the Yunshu low-code platform under Aozhe as an example, which provides a low-threshold development skill set for professional developers and front-line business personnel.
Aozhe Cloud Hub low-code platform architecture
The first is to establish a unified development standard for financial institutions, so that all personnel can develop based on a unified R&D platform, and eliminate the problem of data islands; the second is to provide an asset market for financial-level development, accumulate previous models and components, and develop again Just select call. Financial institutions can develop personalized applications more efficiently and avoid reinventing the wheel, so as to achieve cost control and development efficiency improvement.
In addition, with the support of the cloud-native architecture, Aozhe Yunshu supports elastic expansion, financial enterprises can use computing resources flexibly and efficiently, improve the ability to expand and develop, and have the same personalized expansion as native development.
Relying on continuously iteratively optimized product capabilities and rich practical experience, Aozhe's financial industry service map has included a number of leading financial companies such as Minsheng Securities, Huatai Securities, China Construction Bank, and China Life Insurance.
According to public reports, some financial institutions have formed a hyper-automated platform by using the low-code platform of Aozhe Yunshu, combined with RPA and self-service report analysis tools; The interaction between the three-party platform and the main business system.
Independent and controllable Xinchuang option
The value doesn't stop there.
Starting from the digital evolution of the financial industry, from the end of the last century to the present, it has roughly experienced information transformation, Internet online and digital transformation. At the same time as the digital transformation of the financial industry, regardless of the regulatory level or the actual needs of institutional business, self-control, risk control, and data security have become the ultimate propositions of financial institutions.
Nowadays, the wave of domestic substitution of financial IT systems is coming, and the application development based on Xinchuang environment is naturally facing an urgent transformation task. As the vanguard of Xinchuang, the financial industry has also accelerated the transformation of IOE in recent years. Many financial institutions have completed the domestic replacement of core infrastructure such as databases.
At the same time, Xinchuang's requirements for development capabilities have also been correspondingly raised to low-risk, strong adaptability, and scalable levels. This puts forward a higher standard for low-code development, and it is necessary to get through domestic software and hardware.
It is understood that Aozhe Yunshu has been adapted to most domestic basic software and hardware such as Kunpeng CPU, Kirin system, and Baolande.
In the process of serving a leading securities company in Shanghai, Aozhe assisted it in building an agile development platform under the Xinchuang environment based on the cloud hub. In the initial stage, it mainly built background management side applications such as access control management, collaborative office, and document processing based on this platform. , and opened up multiple data such as official documents, contracts, and office resources to realize the unified integration of business and data.
With the deepening of Xinchuang's establishment and technological development, the agency will build more Xinchuang applications based on the agile development platform to achieve a more comprehensive Xinchuang digital construction.
Write at the end:
For low-code, rather than starting from its existing capability model, it is better to find its unique opening method from the actual scene. This approach is not only for agile development and low risk, and not only for Xinchuang, but also for its process reshaping and thinking innovation in each scenario.
Derivative products are demanded, and products correspond to digital innovations. Finance is a new arena for low-code, and it is also becoming a new battlefield for its self-certification.