Modern-day financial and digital banking businesses face a host of complex challenges when it comes to providing secure, performant APIs. Yet, providing those APIs is no longer optional. Any digital financial service that wants to meet its customers’ demands needs an API ecosystem. Let’s talk about how to achieve that securely.
The financial services evolution
Part of the challenge is the rapid pace at which financial services are changing. End consumers want mobile banking, netbanking, payment wallets that include QR code payments and the ability to conduct transactions through native mobile digital payment apps.
At the same time, the range of organisations that need to provide digital financial services is growing. Financial institutions now include companies with mobile apps that handle payments for government services such as tax payments, companies taking utility payments, businesses conducting electronic know-your-customer (KYC) checks and government welfare schemes that are part of financial inclusion campaigns.
Protecting customer data
All these organisations must comply with regulatory standards and keep their customers’ data safe. They also need to build inclusivity and partnerships to remain competitive. However, in the increasingly fluid world of digital banking and fintech institutions, the need to integrate large public and private datasets creates both complexity and greater potential for security breaches. It is hardly a way to keep regulators happy and customer data safe.
Introducing API as a product
Embracing the concept of APIs as scalable products can help. Gone are the days of point-to-point RPC services limited to backend traffic. Today, businesses need to integrate APIs with multiple data sources to enable the adoption and scaling of digital banking and payment solutions. Worryingly, many CEOs need to expose their APIs and their data in new ways to partners, merchants, banks, and more.
This means it’s time to say goodbye to the monolith. Past time, actually. The level of abstraction that fast-moving modern financial businesses need can only be achieved by breaking down a large monolithic architecture in favour of multiple microservices that are horizontally scalable. This paradigm shift to an abstracted front end is inextricably linked to the productisation of APIs.
Security architecture best practices
A modern API ecosystem requires a modern approach to security that isn’t at the expense of performance. Security architecture best practices are changing rapidly to accommodate this, including the shifting left of security through adopting a DevSecOps approach.
One casualty is the de facto security approach of using a web application firewall (WAF) or external denial-of-service/distributed denial-of-service prevention system. Such architectures bolster only the entry point. Given the volume and scale of API growth, and with companies adopting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures, multiple levels and layers of security are now required.
Security architecture must be holistic, scalable and more dynamic than before if it is not to limit the potential of API abstraction and the resulting business growth. While WAF solutions that come with a reverse proxy or API gateway are suited to solutions that require simple API routing to endpoints and paths, they reduce overall adaptability and scalability in more complex scenarios. They also heavily increase the architectural footprint, negatively affect operational efficiency and require constant security updates for signatures and patches. Very much the opposite of what modern-day fintech businesses need.
Time for Tyk
Forward-thinking fintech and payment gateway applications require complex API routing, orchestration, robust middleware that performs transformations, validation, data source stitching and much more. This is where Tyk’s API management platform comes in.
Security architecture should be designed to prevent attacks and deliver security at the edge, wide area network (WAN), perimeter and protected layers of a given architecture. Tyk is easily integrated with these security layers, providing a zero-trust, holistic security model.
This security architecture enables superior collaboration while distinguishing between security and developer teams. Backend app developers can enjoy tight integration with the Tyk platform to manage the full API lifecycle and codebase. Teams can focus on shifting left by securing their code, app packaging, images, API management configuration and custom middleware.
Any business that treats APIs as products needs a robust, dynamic security architecture like this. Tyk meets that need with a highly scalable and performant API management solution, meeting some of the most complex fintech and digital banking needs. Talk to our team to learn more about how easy it is to integrate Tyk with any modern-day security architecture.
