Riding the No-Code wave of credit automation

When it comes to surviving in our increasingly unpredictable global environment, businesses are looking for set-and-forget engineering platforms to help make credit decisions that ensure clients will pay their bills.

They also want to be able to reduce the time they spend pursuing debtors. By some estimates, small and medium-sized businesses can spend up to 10 percent of their time just chasing invoices for payment. In the current pandemic-affected economy, that is likely to increase.

Automating credit assessment and follow-up can create hours in the day for more productive work. With an ever-shifting landscape of risk, regulations and legislation, nimble systems requiring minimal vendor interaction are pivotal, hence the increasing attraction of and no-code options like Credisense.

Analyst Jason Bloomberg, president of analyst firm Intellyx, in a recent article, noted that an array of platforms and tools have emerged within both the no-code and low-code markets to streamline software solution creation.

“Many of these platforms address non-strategic and/or citizen development use cases,” he says, adding that a class of ‘enterprise’ low-code platforms have emerged that are best-suited to help global organisations build large, complex applications for mission-critical business needs.

Bloomberg notes three characteristics that distinguish enterprise level low-code platforms. These include access to a cloud environment suitable for enterprise use and the ability to create applications with complex business rules, process orchestrations, and integrations. They also need, says Bloomberg: “The ability to provide insights into, and measurements of, the business value of the applications, ensuring that organisations are able to understand the business impact of their software investments.”

However, Bloomberg notes that from the days of COBOL in the 1950s, onto tools like Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes, companies have struggled to make creating applications easier for a wider range of people in the organisation.

“This has led to increasing maturity within two related, but generally distinct segments: no-code and low-code platforms,” he says.” Access and Notes have given way to no-code platforms and tools, which target business users rather than professional developers. These newly dubbed ‘citizen developers’ can use such tools to build a range of different business applications, and can even replace the apps from earlier years.”

He adds: “Many of the no-code players are now attempting to add more sophisticated capabilities to their platforms, thus making them more like the available low-code offerings. At the same time, low-code platforms continue to reduce or eliminate requirements for hand-coding, making their platforms more approachable to less technical users.”

But as Forrester Research analysts John Rymer and Bill Sequin have written, it’s important to understand that the two terms are not interchangeable for apps when it comes to onboarding the credit process.

Even powerful low-code platforms in some cases can’t produce apps without any coding, they note, warning that some projects require tooling that a low-code platform doesn’t provide. And while that may be faster than businesses coding on their own, it can still be hard to estimate cost at the outset of a project.

When enterprise level coding is needed, it has to accomplish three goals: integrating with existing systems, creating custom user interfaces (UI), and meeting reporting requirements.

“No-code has become a marker for products aimed at empowering business users,” say Rymer and Sequin. They consider this option to be a wonderful software-delivery outcome, but advise against expecting it to work for all application projects.

Effective credit risk assessment and management has never been more important. Credisense offers a truly no-code solution. It’s a flexible offering that includes digital onboarding, scoring and decisioning, digital signing and documentation through to  dunning cycle automation, customer portals and dynamic reporting, to help businesses of all sizes streamline their operations, increase their cash flow, and free up their time to focus on developing new customers.