The financial services industry needs to use low code development because it doesn’t have the time or the people to create services the old fashioned way, says Omar Arab, vice president of business development at Veritran. The company provides a low-code solutions to write front-end customer-facing apps. Its code runs at 50 banks with 40 million users and processes 10 billion transactions a year, he said.

“Our customers don’t need to write code, which is a good thing because the industry needs speed to market and secure applications. With Veritran, it takes five minutes to build a wallet, for example.”

The company has development centers in Colombia and Argentina. Arab said it is easy for non-technical business users to build customer centric apps very, very fast.

They will need to as banks pursue digitalization — the clumsy term for moving from legacy platforms designed for paper processes to using digital front office apps such as digital wallets that can interact with business and retail customers.

“Digital transformation is the key, and the digital transformation journey is culture, not technology, Arab. “People need to put focus on one wallet or one digital banking solution. It is impossible to take six months to build one app for a channel — you need to take no more than weeks.”

Veritran has APIs to connect to legacy systems on-prem or to new applications that reside in the cloud, he added, whether they are run by Tier One banks, smaller banks, credit unions or fintechs.

Users including BANORTE, the second largest bank in Mexico, and BBVA in Colombia.

“BANNORTE has 5 million users in our wallet in digital banking, BancoEstado in Chile has been interested in this solution because its focus is financial inclusion. They have three million users in our wallet.”

The bank won the Celent’s 2018 award Model Bank: Financial Inclusion for its app, PagoRUT, “an extremely popular mobile app that allows customers to send and receive payments for free, both in person and remotely,” according to Celent.

“The problem in financial industry is core banking runs on old legacy system and they need to change,” said Arab. “To change the front end is easy — it takes weeks; for the core banking they need more time and more development.”

Although low-code has seen a surge in popularity, both in API stores like Temenos’s and in companies such as Kony, which was bought by Temenos and in Outsystems.
Kony and Outsystems are in Gartner’s Magic Qudrant.

Arab said that Veritran has been low-code since its inception.

“The company to started 15 years and has been low code always,” he said.,”Veritran is the only company with low code that is 100% focused on the financial industry.”