The New Startup: No Code, No Problem – Become a Low Code Digital Entrepreneur

As Wired writes enterprising entrepreneurs are turning to Low Code methods as the ideal toolset for rapidly translating their ideas into working digital businesses.

In the opening paragraph they capture the very essence of this new technology trend.

Prior, any aspiring entrepreneur without coding skills would need to hire developers, easily costing thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. Low Code enables non-technical folks, like entrepreneurs, to create and publish working code. It’s as simple as that.

What is very potent about the Wired case study of Dani Bell, a British copywriter starting out on her own for the first time, is that they explain how she built her online business via a suite of Low Code tools, not just one.

She used Webflow to create the online presence and Airtable for storing details about each job. She also used Google Docs and Slack to manage the sub-contracting of work.

Critically she also integrated these together using another Low Code tool: Zapier. In other words she achieved an entirely end-to-end integrated digital business system, entirely with Low Code, something that only a few years ago would have required a considerable and sophisticated development effort; now it has been abstracted and commoditized to the ultimate level of accessibility.

So this means it isn’t just another iteration of user-friendly web builder tools like Wix or Squarespace, but an expanding evolution of that sector to make enterprise-type Internet technologies both affordable and useable for the smallest of businesses.

In short it has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for digital entrepreneurship for every one. Think of businesses like Uber Taxis or Airbnb, global scale ventures achieved primarily through technology capability, a capability that is now accessible to all, not just highly specialized, expensive developers.

Accelerating Development of Industry SaaS Ventures

An especially potent sub-segment of this trend are Low Code tools that specialize in a particular industry use case, such as Open Banking.

As Joris Lochy writes for FinExtra a key technology trend impacting the banking sector is Low Code, an approach to app development that as the term suggests emphasizes a visual drag and drop metaphor versus code level programming.

Vendors like i-Exceed are applying this to digital banking, where their Appzillon micro-app and automated development approach helps banks in developing self-service and assisted service solutions that facilitate the entire customer onboarding process in a quick and efficient way.

Rodrigo Bernardine, Co-founder at Digibee Inc, believes Low Code is ideal for accelerating the transition to Open Banking, that it is ideal for addressing the complexity in setting up an API portal in order to connect part of their services to the system of other market participants, as these types of connections can be quite a challenge because the existing APIs can’t keep up with today’s fast-paced integration requirements.

Hydrogen enables businesses to configure and embed white labeled financial products without writing a single line of code. This is achieved through a catalogue of No Code components, small standalone software applications built on top of their APIs. All components can be embedded with a few lines of code and easily connected to client data.

These Embeddable Components are self-contained widgets built using modern Web Component or Mobile WebView technologies, performing complex API functions and orchestrations without you needing to write a line of code, that can be configured to your liking in their editor. The components can be used in isolation, or combined to build larger applications, and include functions such as:

• Card Issuance
• Card Activation
• Card Funding
• Card Balance

They also offer White Label Apps, which are fully built web applications that are connected to Hydrogen’s APIs and configurable through their no-code editor. White Label Apps are different than the Embeddable Components, because they contain full end-to-end user journeys with login/logout, sessions, sign ups, dashboards, and settings. Web apps are available on Hydrogen subdomains and are fully hosted by Hydrogen.

Conclusion

Low Code is a white hot technology trend in it’s own right, likewise so is Embedded Finance, therefore where they intersect presents an immensely potent opportunity for banks and fintechs.

Organizations seeking to embed banking services into a mobile super app strategy will ideally do so as quickly as possible to achieve a market first advantage, and the ability to plug and play together modular components, versus hard coding it from scratch, will greatly accelerate that ambition.