Digitization, taxonomy, ESG data management, construction financing and user experience were the central topics of the 4th Symposium – Lending Business of the Future, which fintus hosted as a sponsor together with Börsenzeitung and PwC last Wednesday in Frankfurt.

The event started with a welcome speech by Tomas Rederer, Partner Financial Services at PwC, who caused plenty of discussion among the participants with six hypotheses on the credit business 2023. He was followed by presentations and exciting impulses from Carina Kozole, Head of Credit Risk Operations at Unicredit Bank, on sustainability and banking, Marco Wunderlich, Head of e2e Lending Platform at Deutsche Bank, on Data Driven Automation, and other exclusive speakers. Benjamin Hermanns, founder and CEO of fintus, gave an insight into the topics “Personalized Digitization” and Low-Code Banking.

This year, discussions at the symposium focused not only on sustainable transformation, but also on digital transformation. How to digitize much faster and at the same time personalize more strongly and thus target different customer groups was the focus of the presentation “Digitize personalized now! #lowcodebanking” by Benjamin. In his view, the digital transformation of banks can be greatly facilitated and accelerated by using different software formats. Thus, he gave the audience an overview of full-code, low-code and no-code to be used depending on the use case:

While full code is suitable for the use of rigid objects and complex programming, such as the development of interfaces to connect core systems or larger transaction interfaces, low code is recommended for the definition of interfaces or the elaboration of processes. Like full code, however, low code requires a high level of IT expertise and a very good understanding of data and processes. The clear advantage of low-code, however, is: “Anyone can read low-code,” Benjamin points out in his speech. In this way, he says, the business department can understand the processes and exchange ideas with IT about process optimization. Thus, the use of low-code at fintus always represents an interaction between the IT and business departments.

By contrast, business departments are completely free of IT when using no-code, which allows simple modeling and configuration options, such as configuring new products, changing conditions or setting up exceptions. In summary, however, Benjamin states: “I don’t see any of the three software formats as the sole solution. It takes all three components to be able to implement powerful solutions in the banking sector.” This, he said, guarantees a higher solution speed, significantly better quality, and stronger innovative power through the ability to adapt quickly and flexibly to current market conditions. In this context, he also referred to the article “Low-code – the gamechanger for banking”, which provides further interesting information on the topic.

In addition to innovative technologies in banking, Benjamin also highlighted personalization as an important trend topic in his keynote: “As fintus, we believe very strongly that the time when you can only offer installment loans or fixed-term deposits is over. We believe in offering very strong personalization, ad hoc solutions as well as financial products to meet today’s customer needs.” However, he said, this can only be achieved through rapid responses from financial institutions – without lengthy development work by already busy IT departments. He singles out fintus’ low-code banking platform as a suitable solution here: “With our platform, we enable our customers to develop products, processes and solutions themselves, with a very personalized approach and at the same time a very personalized product focus, in order to differentiate themselves in the market.” The solution, however, is not to launch individual software projects. Rather, with the help of innovative standard software – based on graphical modeling and processes – banks should be enabled to develop applications and solutions very quickly and thus be ready for use in just a few months, which is the focus of fintus.