What are APIs ?
An application programming interface (API) is a set of tools, definitions, and protocols for interfacing different software codes with each other. It allows your products and services to communicate with services hosted on a different platform without any new connectivity infrastructure components.
The versatility of this technology is immense. APIs can be built for communication within internal systems (private APIs), for communication with partner systems on payment or free basis (partnered APIs) or for general benefit of the developer community (public APIs or open source APIs).
A lot of organisations, that had built their services as independent software are now providing the same through APIs to their partners, thus creating a different revenue channel for themselves while expanding the reach of their sales team and facilitating more efficient development for their partners.
Increasing Customer Engagement through APIs
APIs have gained tremendous popularity because of the low barrier to entry in using them. They are easy to use, integrate and develop and this reduces operations cost for implementing them, thus facilitating easy adoption.
Easy integration of multiple systems has led to a sudden increase ion customer expectation as well. Since, customers can access multiple services on the same platform now, the demand for more-more services with lesser navigation has also increased. Demand has fuelled innovation and this in-turn creates better customer experience and engagement resulting in people spending more time online. We have already reached an age where people are spending more time online than on TV and API technology has been a big part of this adoption and continues to be so. As more and more services become available as APIs, better and more innovative solutions will keep on coming up, increasing customer satisfaction and demand for even better applications. If you are not already a part of this revolution, you should get started soon because your competitors are already looking into this option.
APIs in Banking and Vahana Hub
Banking platforms typically need to interact with a lot of systems which makes the onboarding process very tedious for banks and customers alike. For a typical loan journey, there has to be verification from credit authorities, verification of customer’s identity, verification of customer’s employment, verification of income details, interaction with bank’s core banking platform etc. etc. These integrations have been made a lot easier with APIs. Most of the government authorities have come-up with systems giving API based real-time authentication of information. In addition to this, a lot of private organisations and credit authorities offer integrations that make the onboarding journey of customers just a game of a few clicks. Modern systems, read your documents through OCR APIs, get those verified from authorities using another set of APIs, do a background check with credit authorities and fraud list using another set of APIs – run all this data through their own rule engines and generate immediate real-time results – saving time and cost for both the creditor and the customer.
This has resulted in integrated systems with high levels of customer satisfaction, allowing lending firms to scale-up their businesses quickly. However, generally banks are required to get into contracts with all these service providers separately to integrate all these APIs into their system – this involves researching and selecting among different API providers and significant time is also spent on contacting them each separately.
We at Decimal technologies have come-up with an innovative solution for the same. We have recently introduced a module Vahana Hub in our low code platform – Vahana. Vahana Hub serves as a single point API market-place for our clients. We have listed almost 200 API services across multiple vendors already on Vahana Hub and are working towards doubling this number by the end of this year. Our clients can directly subscribe these APIs from our platform and use it in their system – thus reducing the time to research and reach out each vendor separately. This also helps the clients in visualising what all services they can offer their customers in a single platform – thus leading to better applications and better customer satisfaction.
Please reach out to sales@decimal.com for more information.