How can I drive better adoption of my open banking APIs?

APIs are the technology that makes open banking possible. This means that banks and other financial service providers are entering the tech world. And they're finding it's not enough to simply put some APIs on their data.

APIs need to actually be used by developers to create innovative new products and services. In this video, Laura Heritage, Banking and Financial Services Leader at Axway, discusses what developers from fintechs or partners are looking for and what they need to successfully adopt your bank’s APIs. 

“The first thing is, you can't just cater to developers. These APIs are your financial institution’s product offerings. They are a product, and these API products will be your most important channel to market. 

Therefore, you need to cater to the business leaders and product managers as well. 

This is why you need an API marketplace that speaks to the business value of your service offerings. You need to be able to provide interactive examples that are intuitive and show the art of the possible and that resonate with those business leaders and product managers in your target market segment. 

Once these business leaders are intrigued by your product offerings, they will bring in the developers to start to consume your APIs.  

Now, for the developers, you have to make it easy and intuitive to onboard to this marketplace, provision credentials, and gain access to a sandbox environment. 

And then they need to be able to interact with these APIs. You should have a standard specification, be it OpenAPI 2 or 3, or AsyncAPI’s specification in the instance of events or GraphQL schemas. And these specifications need to be properly documented. 

Last but not least, you need complete and documented Postman collections for each of the use case flows. What do I mean by that? 

Well, in the banking industry, an example would be access to accounts, or payment initiation, or money movement. These types of flows typically involve one or more APIs, which is why it is important to have a Postman collection that is a complete documentation of each one of these flows. 

Bottom line is, you need to grab the attention of the business users, get them intrigued so they bring their developers, and get that developer up and running as smooth and as fast as you can, leveraging your APIs. 

Again, you are trying to convince them – the business, through to developers – to use your financial service’s product offering over another financial service’s product offering in one cohesive experience.” 

Watch a 30-minute demo to learn how Amplify Open Banking helps the external fintech developer community easily find and use your APIs.

About the Author

Laura Heritage is the Director of Banking and Financial Services at Axway. Laura is an experienced consultative leader helping banks, financial institutions, and insurance companies embrace and succeed with Open Banking and Open Finance. Her previous experience includes product management and API evangelism, having led API strategy at Akana and championed the API economy at IBM. In her role at Axway, Laura has driven the Amplify Platform and Amplify Open Banking solutions forward as a VP of Product Management, developer, and evangelist. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Laura also holds a certificate from the University of Oxford’s Fintech Programme. She loves a good hackathon and advocates for women in tech in her spare time.

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