Exploiting the power of open APIs

The growth of Open Banking has catalyzed the growth of open APIs, which have become an essential component of digital strategies and are the primary way to grow a financial services ecosystem. Increased API connectivity between banks and third-party firms makes it possible for banks to leverage their existing data and infrastructure to provide new services at a lower cost, and to unlock new opportunities.

Accessed through secure cloud infrastructures, open APIs have become the critical enabler for application integration, customer connectivity and the spread of banking-as-a-platform. Accenture research envisages a 20% revenue uplift for banks that adopt open APIs; conversely, those that fail to exploit the technology are seen to potentially be losing 30% of their business to disruptive new market entrants by the end of 2020. Most are taking the API opportunity. In a recent Finastra survey of global banks, 86% were looking to leverage open APIs to enable open banking capabilities in the next 12 months.

And as platformification – the move to business models based around ecosystems rather than individual firms – gathers momentum, largely as a result of open APIs, banks can evolve and monetize their own product and service offers as well as those provided by third parties.

FusionFabric.cloud from Finastra illustrates the potential of open APIs. An open and collaborative developer platform and marketplace for financial solutions, it’s a place where banks can use APIs to build apps that access core systems across the banking market: retail banking, payments, lending, corporate banking and treasury and capital markets. For fintechs, it opens up a marketplace of thousands of financial institutions. Think of it as a new way of building and distributing banking software: Finastra core systems such as Fusion Essence can help banks, fintechs and developers build apps with ease, extending a bank’s ecosystem and giving all parties new opportunities for revenue growth.

Specific open APIs available on Fusion Essence cover a wide spectrum of retail banking use cases: UK Open Banking, PSD2, customer onboarding, current and savings accounts onboarding, term deposit onboarding, loans, collaterals, payments, financial transactions, ATM and POS transactions, and many more.

To discover more about what open APIs are making possible on the Finastra platform, visit FusionFabric.Cloud.