The largest global banks can spend more than $15 billion a year on technology. It’s an astounding number, which, upon closer examination, reveals the inextricable link between technology and financial services and the degree to which IT strategy is a driver of business strategy and growth in financial services.
To start, financial firms are investing heavily in new technologies to expand and improve their business. Emerging tools like artificial intelligence (AI) have tremendous potential to augment client service, risk management, trading and a host of other areas. This type of technology investment represents the sector’s innovative drive for competitive differentiation and leadership. However, the cutting edge of innovation is only the tip of the $15 billion iceberg of IT spend.
The bulk of the technology budget (60% to 75%) goes to maintaining and coaxing more performance out of a large, complex and aging ecosystem of technologies running the bank. Like an iceberg, what lies beneath the high-tech, modern veneer of financial firms can be a lurking hulk of cost, risk and inefficiency, writes low code platform provider Genesis in a blog post.
Technologists know what’s needed, but the complexity and scale of the IT environment hinders a clear path to the desired end state. There are not enough developers to build all the applications a firm would want and even if they had more capacity, building is costly, time consuming and risky.
At the same time, vendor solutions are rarely, if ever, fully fit for purpose and bring integration, cost and customization challenges. As a result, financial firms find themselves less able to adapt to changing regulation, such as new T+1 requirements, market evolution, such as electronification in fixed income, and black swan events, like the COVID pandemic.
How then, is a firm to break through the buy versus build dilemma and dramatically modernize its technology ecosystem? The most profound change must happen on the build side of the equation and firms must realize that hiring more developers is not the answer. Rather, the goal should be to make it faster, easier for the developers they already have to create enterprise-quality, high-performance applications.
Genesis began building its platform in 2015 and the first production version launched in 2019. Its platform is backed by Bank of America, BNY Mellon and Citi. A new suite of specialized integrated development environment (IDE) plugins deliver AI-driven code automation and real-time code assistance, accelerating software development.
Among the new features are:
- AI-Driven Code Automation: a Large Language Model (LLM) enables developers to describe their intentions in plain text and receive full-stack code to actualize those needs. Translating developer intent into code in real-time speeds up builds and reduces code errors.
- Expanded Front & Back-End Code Assistance: new IDE plugins deliver more extensive auto code completion, on the spot parameter prompts and dynamic programming options to boost speed and accuracy for server-side and interface development.
- OpenAPI Integration: new support for OpenAPI promotes efficient integration and interoperability of Genesis applications within wider enterprise solutions.
- Enhanced Metrics & Monitoring: integration with Micrometer and support for OpenTelemetry observability standards facilitate instrumentation and health and performance monitoring.