Credit unions feel pressure from multiple angles. Their members expect an Amazon-like service and slick digital workflows.
A new generation of employees wants to use modern and intuitive business applications. Management demands the ability to deliver new transformation projects on the fly and be ready to introduce changes faster than ever before.
While automation plays a significant role in this mix, most credit unions still rely on their core systems and outdated tech stacks to cover key workflows. Many of these software packages haven’t been built for change, and require heavy lifting to support and customize.
All eyes turn to information technology (IT) departments that often have small teams, limited budgets, and technical debt to work on.
A no-code approach may bring a needed solution, significantly increasing organizational capacity and allowing credit unions to achieve more with less while accelerating the transformation process.
What’s no-code?
No-code is an approach in software development that offers a set of drag-and-drop tools to configure applications and automate workflows without using traditional means of software development (coding).
Modern no-code platforms provide users with visual designers to swiftly create user interface views, set up business rules and workflows, and even connect systems using pre-built application programming interfaces. This allows organizations to expand the types of roles that can participate in a development process.
Business technologists that understand a needed process but don’t have coding skills can use no-code platforms to build applications, removing the burden from IT departments and accelerating time to value.
Business and IT can form multi-disciplinary teams that combine people with different knowledge and skill sets to work on complex automation scenarios.
Overall, the no-code approach fosters innovation and disrupts traditional ways of deploying automation. This approach allows smaller IT teams to share the workload with business groups that understand member experience and needed processes and to configure needed applications and workflows alongside their more technical co-workers.
This can enable credit unions to significantly increase their speed of delivering automation projects so they can keep up with competitors with larger IT budgets.
Use cases
What use cases can be automated with the help of no-code? The options are wide.
Members are at the center of everything credit unions do. No-code platforms can be used to consolidate member profiles, automate the onboarding process, deliver personalized consultations and offers, and resolve member cases and requests.
Credit unions can also use no-code technologies to automate processes to streamline loan approvals, verifications, and underwriting. They can digitize compliance and risk management processes and, in the meantime, provide employees with a number of internal business apps to increase collaboration and productivity.
No-code adoption
There are multiple ways to kick off the no-code adoption process. We recommend starting with simpler apps (focused on one department or set of users) and deploying them with external help while ensuring a high level of participation of the internal team.
We also suggest reviewing available no-code methodologies and establishing a strong no-code governance process. Once an organization becomes more familiar with the technology and the approach, it can start building a center of excellence, assigning full- or part-time no-code architects and creators that can take over more complex and even business-critical automation tasks.
No-code represents a new way for credit unions to drive automation and digitize processes. It engages business technologists in a configuration process, significantly expanding capacity and accelerating time to market.
As a result of no-code adoption, credit unions can build a strong competitive differentiation through the ability to bring digitized, member-centric workflows faster than the competition.
In the meantime, to fully adopt the no-code approach, credit unions need to invest in building the needed skills to drive secure automation in a tight collaboration between business and IT.
Credit Union Rock Stars are outstanding credit union professionals and directors from a wide range of disciplines who inspire and innovate to advance the missions of their credit unions. The 25 members of the 11th class of Rock Stars were selected for their exceptional creativity, innovation, and passion.
