Speaking to TechGraph, Muzammil Patel, Head of Strategy, Finance, and Operations & Co-founder of Acies discusses the company’s vision to democratize technology through the affordable and inclusive Revolutio platform, empowering entrepreneurs and businesses for rapid digitalization and new monetization opportunities.
Read the complete interview:
TechGraph: How does the company work towards achieving the vision and what specific initiatives or strategies are in place to promote accessibility and inclusivity in the technology and financial sectors?
Muzammil Patel: Acies is focused on democratizing technology. This involves making our no-code platform Revolutio more easily accessible, available, and affordable to a broader spectrum of innovators, creators, entrepreneurs, and businesses. This would help in rapid digitalization and the creation of new business models and monetization opportunities. We are focusing on making Revolutio available on a full SAAS model beyond the B2B enterprise segment.
We are heavily investing in moving from drag-and-drop-based interactions with the system to natural language and speech-based inputs in the near term. We will, in the longer term, look to make language-based inputs available in several languages. This will enable inclusion for a wide range of people.
Acies LightHouse is also focused on tech and financial literacy to educate and empower people to use no-code and other emerging tech. Acies Ventures will increase the pace of startups’ enrollment under the Ventures-Revolutio program. This will give entrepreneurs easy access to our technology and help them navigate the path to success.
TechGraph: Could you elaborate on how Acies leverages technology to deliver practical and tangible outcomes for its clients? Can you provide some examples of successful projects where No Code Platform implementation has yielded significant benefits?
Muzammil Patel: Acies has been focused on actualizing use cases for no-code in the Financial Services Industry. Given the mission-critical nature of use cases, the high degree of information security standards, and the strong regulatory framework in the Financial Services Industry, it helps set a high standard for Revolutio and no-code platforms in general.
We have successfully delivered automation in the Risk and Regulatory space. This includes IFRS 9 automation, planning and budgeting, fund transfer pricing, asset-liability management, operational risk management, incident management, and many other use cases. More than USD 8 billion of derivatives are processed on our Core Derivatives system. More importantly, we have been focused on broad-based use cases in data analytics, digital transformation, and customer and employee engagement.
Revolutio has helped some of the leading banks create and deploy apps in less than 3 weeks at a fraction of the cost they would spend on traditional app development. TCO of apps built stands at 25% of the cost of traditional app development allowing for more rapid digitalization, lower maintenance costs, and ease of managing ongoing changes.
TechGraph: Could you discuss some of the key approaches and methodologies Acies employs to drive innovation within client organizations? Additionally, how does Acies balance the need for speedy implementation with ensuring quality and effectiveness?
Muzammil Patel: Revolutio is a user-first technology. This means that our technology focuses on practical end-use cases that solve real-world problems. Acies TechWorks works closely with Acies Consulting to re-imagine and re-engineers the scope and extent of automation with a combined focus on the subject matter and tech architecture.
The approach focuses on reducing existing process redundancies, eliminating manual engagement in high-risk and high-touch areas, and building reporting, intelligence, and control systems as an integral part of core applications. This has helped clients increase automation scope, simplify tech stacks and make their architecture more nimble and scalable.
In addition, they focused on solving real business issues.
Balancing speedy implementation with quality and effectiveness is anchored on two aspects (i) eliminating coding while automating through our pre-architected no-code platform Revolutio (ii) bringing together Acies Consulting’s deep domain expertise to pre-build solutions based on industry knowledge
TechGraph: Can you shed light on the company’s strategy for integrating these various components to create holistic and comprehensive solutions for its clients, particularly within the financial sector?
Muzammil Patel: Our aim for Financial Services as an industry is to bring down the cost of delivery and management overhead while enabling unfettered product innovation across the banking and capital markets space. As the sectors disaggregate, the most efficient delivery platforms and open aggregator platforms are likely to prevail. Our goal is to provide the backbone for data management to help federate data across the different silos of the organization to enable seamless delivery at a low cost to the end consumer.
At the same time, our focus is on enabling data conversion into intelligence. We are creating products and workflows where federated data resides rather than in organizational silos. We believe that in the near term, the Financial Services industry will move away from siloed legacy data warehouses and core transaction processing systems to a federated data model. This will enable unlimited applications built to monetize this underlying data. Revolutio provides a single integrated platform to achieve that goal.
TechGraph: Acies Consulting targets financial institutions, such as banks. What sets Acies apart from its competitors in serving financial institutions’ needs? How does the company leverage its expertise to address the specific challenges and requirements of this industry?
Muzammil Patel: The ability to bring together knowledge, domain, and technology in a single package is the core ethos of our operating model. Our ability to use our technology and innovate with every evolving business or product evolution allows us to respond to market needs quickly. This allows us to serve our customers with greater confidence and an outcome orientation. Since we don’t depend on third-party proprietary technology, we can innovate, adapt and commit to outcomes that align with our client’s strategies.
Apart from this, we have developed a deep understanding of regulatory requirements, both technical and subject matter related, which are embedded in our products. This requires very short time and effort to put our solutions into practice. We are increasingly able to produce near plug-and-play solutions and products for the enterprise B2B segment. This is a segment that has traditionally been used for long implementation cycles.
TechGraph: How does Acies stay at the forefront of technological advancements to ensure it delivers on this vision? Are there any ongoing research and development initiatives or partnerships in place to explore emerging technologies and their potential applications?
Muzammil Patel: Staying at the forefront of technological advancement involves engaging with multiple technologies, evaluating use cases, the maturity of the technology, and its commercial viability. This is a continuous process undertaken by our CTO organization. Multiple research and development initiatives are underway currently.
Some of these include moving away from visual drag-and-drop symbols to speech-based interaction for building apps, use of generative AI to guide users through the app development journey, use of AGI and generative AI to study user behavior and suggest ongoing improvements in apps to developers and users of supervised ML models to personalize user experiences within each app based on user patterns.
Our research and development are undertaken in-house at this point. We will start looking to build partnerships both for research and incorporating third-party tech into our solutions over the next 6 months. We expect to start working more closely with academia to deepen research into tech where we see more practical applications over the next 5 years.
TechGraph: What exactly is the future of the No Code platform in India in comparison to the worldwide scenario? What is the size of the opportunity in India?
Muzammil Patel: According to a NASSCOM report, India’s low-code and no-code market stands at USD 400 million which is projected to grow to USD 4 billion by 2025. We expect the market share to be much larger as traditional and legacy IT spending is redirected towards no-code. IT spending last year was estimated at USD 227 billion of which domestic spending was approximately USD 49 billion. We expect that no-code platforms and associated services will constitute about 25% of all existing IT spending by 2025.
No-code platforms have evolved rapidly over the last 2 years. From being used for MVPs and peripheral development, they are becoming central to the IT architecture. They are replacing traditional data management software, workflow management software, and even transaction processing systems.
TechGraph: What are your goals for the upcoming fiscal year?
Muzammil Patel: Our goal and focus remain on democratizing technology. For us, success is measured by how many people we make technology accessible to. It is also measured by how many people used technology to generate alternate sources of income and monetization opportunities. For this to happen in a meaningful way, we see three major milestones to achieve this year (i) make Revolutio accessible to everybody in a SAAS format where they can simply log in and start building enterprise-grade apps (ii) make the developer experience simpler to a point where the experience is as simple as using a word-processor or a spreadsheet (iii) build out a marketplace to enable creators and app developers to monetize their work.
Apart from this, we believe that increasing the footprint of the Ventures-Revolutio program will enable and empower more entrepreneurs to actualize their ideas. We will look to onboard people faster into this program.