Agility vs resilience: a new era beyond EUCs 

Introduction

A key challenge in financial services is managing the rapidly evolving landscape of regulations, and technologies while trying to innovate and set yourselves apart from the competition. For instance, Over 75% of European compliance leaders reported a 35% rise in their compliance workload in the past year, reflecting the sharp increase in regulatory demands on financial institutions (Dun & Bradstreet). 

This is compounded by the need to maintain a balance of resilience and agility. On the one hand, we have giant applications from well-known companies that are very robust and offer an end-to-end solution but tend to be very expensive, very slow to implement and unable to accommodate custom requirements. On the other hand, we have the super agile but not at all resilient or secure EUCs.

These are fast to build and fully customizable but regularly lead to risks and errors, some of which can be hugely damaging. A recent Chartis study found that up to $12.1 billion may be at risk at the world’s 50 largest financial institutions due to improper use of end-user computing (EUC) tools. 

Are EUCs putting your business at risk? Find out now 

Essentially, EUCs have been used by the industry to cover the gaps left by the inflexibility of monolithic applications. While these sometimes appear to be ideal solutions, the lack of controls and industrialization has led to increased regulatory scrutiny, and a subsequent a huge technical debt accrued by financial institutions over the past few decades.  

Early attempts failed to address this problem with general-purpose low-code solutions promising drag-and-drop app creation for citizen developers. In fact, only 12% of firms manage their business processes using low-code tools after purchase. While ideal for simple use cases it quickly became evident that the complexities of real-time, audited, regulated, secure and standards-based financial markets applications are not a fit for multi-industry generic platforms. This also brought a slew of new and more complicated EUCs where processes were not managed effectively.  

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Empower your business-aligned technology teams 

It’s important to remember that EUCs are only ever the go-to solution when centralized IT teams are unable to deliver something strategic promptly. This is often not the fault of the IT organization because, as previously explained, many of the big applications used by financial institutions are not flexible enough to integrate with internal systems or even with each other.  

The approach to solving these issues often requires spending too much time and resources to justify because building an application from scratch that is fit for the heavily controlled and regulated reality of financial markets is often a multi-year project in a large bank.   

This means that not only is it extremely difficult to build applications that plug holes in the existing technology stack, but it is also tough to innovate and foster new ideas.  

The truth is that building robust and resilient applications is a highly complicated task and normally requires specific expertise from multiple teams, even for the most basic of applications. Genesis sits in this space of rapidly building applications from the ground up within both centralized and business-aligned technology teams rather than end users. This is achieved through an application platform that utilizes re-usable components, a high-performance runtime and a suite of development tools, augmented with AI functionality to help developers build applications faster than ever.  

Solution: Consider implementing a modular, multi-asset solution that supports quoting and execution at scale. Features such as internal distribution enable firms to efficiently leverage held positions, while portfolio tools allow for rapid proposal generation, tailored to evolving investor demands. Implementing a strong foundation supports seamless expansion and product innovation without overwhelming operational resources. 

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What makes building an Excel EUC so easy? 

Firstly, from an operational perspective, there is no Identity and Access Management (IAM) which obviously speeds up development but creates its own risks, there is no need to commission a database (or any other infrastructure for that matter) and finally, there is no red tape to cut through because it sits outside of formal change and CI/CD processes. 

Now add in the fact that the UI is pre-built, so there is no need for UI development and there is also no real backend development. This allows the creator the freedom to focus on the real value, the business logic.  

Now if you want to turn an Excel EUC into a full stack application, these are just some of the things that you would need to account for. That means that turning even a simple EUC into an industrialized application will carry a significant enough overhead to deter the people who control the budgets from wanting to commit unless they have enough pressure from risk and compliance. 

Fortunately, these are all things that naturally come out of the box with any application built on the Genesis Application Platform.  

Because of this, Genesis has been able to deliver custom built solutions that either prevented EUCs, or replaced them with robust and industrialized applications, able to be integrated into an existing CI/CD pipeline and change management process.