Katharina Haack, API Product Owner at Commerzbank, discusses their API strategy and governance, leading to ecosystem engagement and increased business.
Hi, my name is Katharina, and I'm a Product Owner at Commerzbank overseeing API strategy and governance. Commerzbank is a leading bank in the German market with over 11 million private, business, and corporate clients. We began building our API ecosystem around 2017, anticipating PSD2 regulations. From the outset, we prioritized premium APIs, and now we have developed a portfolio encompassing various internal and external APIs.
Our ecosystem primarily serves internal consumers and providers, as well as our external customers, and we have reached a milestone of 1 billion API calls per month. This growth underscores the continuous expansion of our ecosystem. Early on, we focused on business APIs rather than just technical APIs, despite challenges in implementation discussions. Emphasizing customer needs and value addition has been crucial, ensuring our APIs are easy to understand, consume, and deliver significant value to our customers.
For example, our Securities API, accessible externally, integrates with Wealth Pilot to offer customers a comprehensive asset overview. This integration simplifies access to data for Wealth Pilot customers who are also Commerzbank clients, facilitating an aggregated view of their assets through the Wealth Pilot interface.
Engaging business lines was pivotal; we conducted numerous workshops, trainings, presentations, and informative sessions across the organization to ensure widespread understanding of API benefits. Implementing an API-first strategy was integral, prioritizing API-based interfaces wherever feasible. Notably, we've achieved over 1,200 reuse cases, demonstrating efficiency gains and cost savings.
In laying the groundwork for our API journey, we prioritized a stable, robust, and highly secure management platform. Collaborating with experts, and with support from Axway, our partner, we established what we deemed the optimal architecture for developing our services. This foundational step has been instrumental in our success, enabling us to address challenges effectively and build upon a stable platform.
Looking ahead, our vision within the API and business connectivity domain is to enhance our customers' lives while also exploring monetization opportunities. We believe there is significant market potential for monetizing external APIs due to their ease of integration and broad usability.
