By David Biesack, Apiture Chief API Officer
These days, it is a great idea for institutions to be all about APIs. At least, that is the central point I shared as a guest on Tyk’s “All About APIs” podcast. In Episode 007 (how cool is that)? I discussed API enablement for the digital banking industry.
There are several key takeaways, but I encourage you to watch (or listen) to the episode to get the full story. The main thrust is that APIs are the cornerstone of innovation and delivering new and better banking experiences to financial institutions’ customers and members.
A key to a good API program is designating a set of API design principles. In the podcast, I discuss the tradeoffs between API security and ease of use. Because APIs are now a significant attack vector for bad actors, API Security should be a high-ranking API design principle and should be a key part of any financial institution’s API strategy.
Another essential piece of an API strategy is to embrace the OpenAPI Specification for describing RESTful APIs. By employing an industry standard, your organization can define the API contract in a well-known and widely adopted format. This enables a larger set of API consumers to work together towards delivering new experiences that banking customers demand.
The podcast also highlights some of the benefits the banking industry can gain from an API-first approach built on OpenAPI. These benefits include sophisticated tooling that accelerates the software development lifecycle of API design, development, validation, deployment and evolution, and a developer experience that enables other development teams to consume those APIs.
While the U.S. does not have an open banking standard similar to Open Banking in Europe, we are seeing initiatives like Financial Data Exchange gaining traction. In the podcast, I discuss the growing role of such industry consortia in setting a baseline banking API to provide common interoperability between financial institutions and other software providers.
Luckily for Apiture, our bank and credit union clients get the benefits of APIs without the need to invest in a large digital enablement API and IT team — we do that for you. The Apiture Digital Banking Platform lays the foundation for new partners to expand the power of the platform using APIs.
The podcast has much more to say, so I encourage anyone interested in the science and art of APIs to give it a listen. Contact us for more about APIs.