Consulting firm Innopay has released the latest edition of its Open Banking Monitor, shedding light on the latest trends and shifts in the rapidly evolving API products landscape. Mounaim Cortet, a Director at Innopay and lead author of the report, outlines three key findings from the report.
Banks are advancing their API maturity
Compared to last year’s results of the Open Banking Monitor, banks are offering more APIs, demonstrated by a 17% increase in APIs offered per bank. This increase implies that the APIs offered by banks now cover a broader variety of common banking functionalities.
Top of the list are still account information (for various account types) and payment initiation (for various payment instruments) and payment management (for various user-initiated actions around the payment). These are followed by customer information APIs (enabling the controlled sharing of selected data attributes), which have increased considerably.
Similarly, a variety of corporate APIs have hit the market further driving efficiencies and improved customer experience in transaction banking operations (e.g. Trade Finance guarantees, electronic bank account management and realtime cash pooling capabilities).
Developer experience on the rise
On average, developer experience increased with 11%, raising the bar across the landscape. This was driven by:
Community Development: 22% increase of banks actively investing in community development efforts through news articles, blogs, events, or partnership programs. This indicates that banks are picking up on the importance of establishing an open banking community to drive innovation.
Developer Usability: 21% increase through additional, or optimised, development tools such as dynamic sandbox functionalities, detailed ‘getting started’ guides, or more comprehensive application & credential management features – providing for a better development experience by easing the life of API consumers.
API Documentation: 3% increase in features such as information on API business context, API versioning & changelogs, and conciseness of the API specifications – improving overall readability of the API documentation and related content.
Middle East banks are stepping up their game
Over the past two years, multiple banks based in the Middle East have managed to secure a (and advance their) position in the Open Banking Monitor. AKBank, Arab Bank, IsBank, KuveytTürk, Albaraka, and now VakifBank have rapidly launched and evolved their open banking propositions.
Sourced from Consultanct.eu