That's a future where an end-user does not have to tolerate a manual workflow and can materially change their desktop software assets, to amplify their productivity and reduce risk.
As an industry we have been edging slowly towards this reality for 20 years; with products like MS Access and MS Excel, then RPA and BPM tools, and most recently, the desktop-interop movement.
Along with an “API first” design mindset, the traditional black boxes are being broken down the into more flexible, composable building blocks.
The most visible and recent steps forward in this regard - Low/no-code solutions - has however been greeted with unrestrained (and disproportionate?) excitement.
Yes, an army of “citizen developers” is going to be a key building block for the future but a panacea to all capital markets software development shortages, it is not.
Not least when tackling data-driven high-performance systems, the root cause needs to be tackled first, which is the fundamentally limited productivity of existing development teams.
Developers have been underserved in recent years and without new dev tools operating at higher-level abstractions, time will continue to be wasted on low level infrastructure, rather than differentiating features.