Building a sustainable API strategy for the future

The fintech industry is growing considerably across the globe, from London to Singapore, from Tel Aviv to New York and beyond, with startups and more established companies using a modern technology stack to deliver new products and services for their customers. By adopting agile development practices and infrastructures using microservices, containerisation and other cutting-edge tech, they’re able to get to market quicker, at a lower cost, and differentiate themselves from the more traditional financial institutions seeking to establish themselves in the fintech space.

Central to the digital transformation of the finance industry has been the investment made in Open API and Open Data initiatives. These concepts have enabled companies to build ecosystems with their partners and customers, allowing them to develop new and innovative products and services in what has become known as Open Banking. This is a significant opportunity for the finance industry and for those organisations acting as API providers, the potential is enormous.  

What matters most to fintechs, who typically don’t hold accounts or banking licenses, is giving their customers what they want when they want it. They’re all seeking to offer a product or service and a level of service that you don’t get from traditional financial providers. 

Some fintechs choose to build their API platforms themselves, from the ground up. This generally requires investing heavily in development and spending loads of time, energy and money creating platforms to build, secure and scale their APIs. However, many of the tools required to do this are already available out-of-the-box from companies like Tyk. As an alternative to building and securing your APIs in-house, why not use an enterprise-ready solution like Tyk to assist with such an effort?

Whether you’re re-platforming your API management solution or looking to move into the Open Banking and Open Finance space with commercial API’s, Tyk can help. We give our users a platform to accelerate the implementation of their Open Banking initiatives; and at a cost suitable for startup budgets, not those of large corporations. Tyk offers one of the most robust and customisable API management solutions on the market including out-of-the-box support for almost any authentication and authorisation needs (including custom ones) and fully customisable plugins. 

This continuous approach to API management, whether focusing on API security across the SDLC or evolving API design and governance as the company’s needs change, is critical to success. Tyk has been designed by engineers for engineers knowing that API management isn’t static but changes as company’s grow. And as fintechs acquire more customers, it is important that the processes, platform and strategy are in place to test, deploy, and publish API’s to meet more and more SLA’s.

Fintech leaders use Tyk’s API management platform so they can invest their resources on their core businesses. Our powerful, lightweight, and feature-packed API Gateway does the hard work, so our users can get back to creating the cool stuff; and we do this without touching a single line of code. 

They use Tyk for authentication and authorisation, rate limiting and quotas, security, analytics, and improving the time-to-market for new products and services – all without increasing their overheads or vulnerabilities. 

And it’s not just recent market entrants like Modulr that are adopting this strategy; more traditional financial organisations like Société Générale are also managing and securing their API’s with Tyk.

We understand the complexities of building a business and the importance of stability and security at scale. We understand that having the right policy and governance in place to ensure compliance with issues like data sovereignty and privacy is critical to success. And we understand the opportunities that Open Banking affords. That’s why Tyk is the partner of choice for many of the world’s fintechs and why it should be yours.