This was a fairly high level presentation I did at the APIdays Open Banking and Fintech event in London where I started to explore the main drivers for APIs, the mega trends in consumer banking and the various use cases for APIs within Financial Services.
4. 4
Digital is transforming every business
Nature of Market
Retail
Music
Cars
CPG
Books
Food
Cleaning
Services
Consulting
Mining
Weightless
Intermediate
Nature of Product
2000s
2030s
Heavy
B2CB2B2CB2B
2020s
Source: Gartner - CEOs and CIOs Must Assume That Every Industry Will Be Digitally Remastered, 2014, Raskino
7. Speed up while preserving existing investments
7
Backend
Intelligent Digital Business Platform layer
SOA / Middleware layer
System of
Record
YearsMonths
IT Applications Partner Apps Mobile Clients
"Internet of
Things"
Days
Database
API EXPOSURE
API CONSUMPTION
CEOs and CIOs Must Assume That Every Industry Will Be Digitally Remastered
Published: 20 August 2014 Analyst(s): Mark Raskino
if you're a music company today, no aspect of your business is not digital...
Internal slide purpose/ zoom in on the highest level of problem that faces every digital business which Apigee can help with
There may be many reasons for why seamless experiences are hard. For example: imagining the experience is hard, getting funding or figuring out ROI may be hard.
However, by far the hardest part is connecting these experiences across different apps, data and devices.
The connections need to happen both for new systems you are building as well as the back end of systems you already have. In fact, your most precious assets like customer data, inventory, payments etc. are already in your systems of record.
You have to stitch every little fabric of digital experience such that the seams and stitching don't show.
That’s hard.
Operationally, there is only one modern way to do this…APIs
At Apigee we believe that the right tool for the consumption or outside in layer should have the following characteristics:
Self Service & Ease of Use - Providing self-service capabilities in all aspects of the platform for developers, administrators and other API team members to improve speed and agility. Agility is a key aspect of being successful in the digital economy. To improve agility, one needs to reduce friction in getting things done when using the platform. Self-service capabilities reduce this friction to help you get things done faster and helps with faster adoption.
Multi-Tenant Architecture - Multi-tenancy means easily having a logical separation for business units or teams without changing the underlying platform. This allows a central IT team that has to be responsible for the platform to have centralised control but still allow decentralised development and a lifecycle of APIs by the various API teams. A great balance between centralised operational control with decentralised development with innovation and pace.
State at Scale - Systems that are stateless are easier to scale. API Management requires one to scale while maintaining state such as authentication, authorization, quotas, IP validation, caching for performance and “recording” for analytical purposes. Scaling like this is hard as you need to do it whilst being performant with no impact on latency. When your business needs scale and hence API traffic increases, the API performance needs to match the need so the API consumer or the app user experience is not tarnished.
Security - In Financial Services, as in many other verticals like Retail and Health, protecting data and being compliant with regulations is mandatory, out of the box features such as Role Based Access Control, Audit Logging, secure multi-tenancy and data isolation are critical out of the box features to avoid heavy customisation to become compliant.
Public Cloud and Private Cloud are equal citizens - When you are operating at the scale of a financial services company you have to operate every platform like an internally hosted SaaS product. If you have the same on premise product for your private cloud as the vendor’s public cloud offering you can be sure that you have the performance, scale, and operational rigor the vendor puts the product through prior to you having to host it on your private cloud.
Configuration and Code - Following the Pareto principle we believe that 80% of the things you would need to do in an API Platform should be done fast via drag and drop of pre-built policies that just require simple configuration. However for the remaining 20% it is a losing proposition to try to provide configuration for possible use case. Therefore we strongly believe that you need both configuration and code in your platform.