To the Future and Beyond: A Composable No-Code Approach for Credit Unions

Credit unions are headed towards a digital future as consumer preferences rapidly evolve, advanced technologies disrupt customer journeys and the market becomes increasingly saturated. At this point, however, many credit unions have not yet adopted advanced business technology to meet the automation demands of their members. This puts them at risk of losing their market share to organizations that prioritize technology as a core aspect of their growth strategies.

Today, many credit unions use legacy systems built for everyday transactions. While these systems have been sufficient for essential operational processes, their limited customization and scalability is preventing credit unions from being agile and adaptable, thus hindering their transformation.

Members want digital, compelling, high-quality experiences that ensure seamless interactions between various touchpoints during a single transaction. While the need for faster transformation is evident, there are scarce IT resources available on the market and limited budgets allocated to technology investments within credit unions, as not-for-profit organizations.

Due to these pressures, credit unions need a solution that embraces innovation, streamlines workflows, and supports team and member interactions – all while avoiding the need for additional IT staff and hefty price tags.

A Solution That Is Pluggable, Replaceable & Reusable

To become truly member-centric, credit unions must make the member experience feel frictionless, yet personal at the same time. One of the major ways to achieve that is to empower business users without a technical background to create digital solutions and digitize their processes on their own. This can be achieved with no-code platforms for credit unions.

No-code is a modern approach to software application development that requires no coding, so that even users with no technical background – no-code creators – can create new business applications, digital workflows and UI/UX pages, for example. The building blocks and tools for such a development process are provided by a no-code platform.

Credit unions can become one of the greatest champions of no-code composable architecture software, which enables them to easily integrate with their legacy systems, further complementing their existing ecosystem with modern, user-friendly, agile tools.

But composable software architecture goes one step further. It means all components are pluggable, replaceable and reusable, which allows for the quick automation of a wide range of workflows without custom development. It replaces a significant amount of configuration, customization and development work when workflows or applications need to be adjusted or new solutions constructed. Better yet, no-code creators can turn newly developed functionality into composable elements that can also be reused in the future – saving both time and resources.

Composable No-Code Architecture

Composable no-code architecture is a perfect fit for workflow-intensive organizations because it offers outstanding visual workflow design capabilities that even non-technical users can fully master. By automating and streamlining their workflows, credit unions can dramatically improve their across-the-board efficiencies and ensure a consistently superior member experience. In the hands of subject matter experts, no-code technology becomes a powerful innovation tool without the need for a designated software developer.

This approach allows users to design, automate, execute, track and optimize practically any workflow for financial institutions – by simply dragging and dropping pre-built block-based components.

Areas of Application

Credit unions can achieve greater efficiencies and dramatically improve engagement for their members as well as their own employees by automating workflows even in just some of the following areas:

• Loan application and underwriting: Credit unions can streamline their loan application and underwriting processes by dragging and dropping pre-built components into a sequence to customize and automate many of the manual tasks associated with loan provisioning and provide a seamless experience for members.
• Account management and onboarding: No-code composable architecture platforms can be used to simplify account management and onboarding processes for new members, reducing the time and resources required to get them set up and started.
• Compliance and risk management: By using a composable no-code approach, credit unions can better manage their compliance and risk management requirements to ensure across-the-board data consistency and regulatory compliance. This includes automating compliance checks and managing risk assessments more efficiently.
• Marketing and member engagement: Users can design highly personalized campaigns to improve member engagement and deliver omnichannel member support by providing a centralized platform for managing communications and promotions.
• Member portal and mobile app: Using pluggable pre-built blocks, users can develop a custom-branded member portal and mobile app, providing members with a convenient and secure way to access their accounts and engage with the credit union.

Tech-Savvy Credit Unions

Digital presence allows tech-savvy credit unions to deliver personalized and seamless digital banking experiences, and create unique value-added services that make them visibly stand out among the competition. Through the adoption of meta-technologies such as composable no-code architecture, digital transformation is not only within reach, but a must to redefine their operations and offer competitive advantages to members.

Andie Dovgan is Chief Growth Officer for Creatio, a workflow automation and CRM platform provider based in Boston.