Open API

Ariunbold Buyan-Ulzii, Chief Information Officer and Saruulbat Gantugs, Manager at IT Architect, Khan Bank

Ariunbold Buyan-Ulzii, Chief Information Officer and Saruulbat Gantugs, Manager at IT Architect, Khan Bank

User experience continues to change rapidly in line with the development and advancement of technology. Its example is that users can now solve their financial problems through various other service applications and systems in addition to banking applications. This has created a new FinTech industry, and multiple new products are emerging.

By introducing advanced technologies, commercial banks have established new product and service channels and increased their sales by offering the infrastructure and technology needed by FinTech companies instead of competing with them.

Introducing new technology and changing the industry, where legal and compliance requirements are very high, requires much effort and capital. Today, I am very pleased to share our experience and solutions we have deployed, enabling integration of banking services into your systems and applications through Open API with ensured information security, availability and integrity of your data, and strict legal and compliance requirements met.

What is an Open API?

The concept of Open API must be briefly explained first. Open APIs provide opportunities for developers and FinTech companies to access the data in the banking system and obtain financial services with the customer's consent. Namely, the following services are available through Open APIs:

• Information transfer/sharing. For instance, customer’s account information, balance, and statements.

• Payment and settlement. Enable a banking payment and settlement for a customer on its system without re-directing them to a banking application.

• Money transfer. A user can quickly and conveniently make money transfers and financial transactions in one place without using multiple applications.

Where did the project start from?

If traditional banks used to provide only financial products and services, modern banks have launched entirely new, technology-driven products. Our Information Technology team initiated the deployment of the Open API service, which was successfully implemented as a project in 2022. Of course, we endured many significant challenges during the project implementation, and I would like to highlight two challenges we had to overcome to keep the article interesting.

One. Technology as a financial product

Getting the business and sales teams to understand the opportunities enabled by technology and engaging with these teams as a part of the collaboration was the first big challenge for our project team.

A successful project implementation was not purely dependent on technology experts alone, we needed a diverse team of people from business, operations, marketing, etc.

So, to achieve that, we had to conduct thorough technology research and understand the business environment as our priority task. These were followed by multiple sessions with business and operations teams, where we successfully explained and understood the opportunities to be enabled by technology. This way, we could establish a full-scale professional team with all the necessary stakeholders engaged and start the work.

As a project team, we managed the project agilely to ensure quick decision-making for changes to occur. The project was successfully implemented, delivering significant changes to business processes, operations, and product business models, and the service was successfully introduced to the market.

Two. Development of optimal technology solutions

Technology solution is the most essential part of releasing Open APIs. Regarding technology, we came down to a need for two leading solutions: an API Gateway to open APIs and a developer portal to learn, explore, and enable the utilization of open APIs.

API Gateway and its features

API Gateway may be understood as one kind of a service. This is a coordinator between the backend service and a user’s application. To elaborate, it performs the following actions:

• Requests routing

• Load balancing

• Offloading between SSL/TCL protocols

• Authentication and authorization

• Access control

• Error handling

• Analytical monitoring, etc.

By introducing advanced technologies, commercial banks have established new product and service channels and increased their sales by offering the infrastructure and technology needed by FinTech companies instead of competing with them.

Numerous API Gateway platforms are operated in the market: Google ApiGee, Kong, Amazon API gateway, NGINX, WSO2, etc. Nowadays, most solutions tend to move to cloud environment. But, as I mentioned earlier, it was the next major challenge that a cloud-based solution was directly used in financial services due to legal and compliance requirements. Therefore, we created on-premises solutions and managed to create an infrastructure and platform that provides safe, reliable, and available services on par with the services offered by giant cloud platforms.

API Monetization

Our API Gateway created the possibilities below to commercialize and sell open APIs as business products.

• API packages: APIs are offered as a package product.

• Rate plans: Creation of price offers for each package of products to meet customer needs.

• Pre-paid/Postpaid: Creation of payment options as pre-paid or postpaid variations.

• Monetization of APIs: Creation of payment options calculated based on the customer's package of choice and usage.

This allowed us to offer multiple API packages with customized rate plans and monetize the payment based on selected packages and rate plans. This made us stand out from others and was our newly created advantage.

Self-Service Developer Portal

The self-service portal is a portal website that allows customers to register on the portal, get acquainted with open APIs, obtain information on packages, purchase them, enter into contracts, etc., without human intervention from the bank. Knowing our customers or remote KYC and complying with regulatory laws, regulations, compliance requirements, and contract signing was also a major challenge.

It was innovative that we utilized digital signatures to execute contracts and provide opportunities to obtain services without human intervention. This allowed the customer to change and manage their API packages from anywhere at any time.