WHY INDIAN BANKS NEED TO ADOPT AN API-CENTRIC APPROACH?
Indian banks today find themselves in an intriguing situation where, on one hand, they have an opportunity to work in one of the fastest growing economies, with a large population to cater to and an aggressive drive toward digitalization. On the other hand, there are myriads of challenges with increasing competition from fintech and payments banks, with the changing needs of Indian customers, disruptive technologies and stringent RBI regulations.
New era of digital
The Indian banking space is entering a new era of ‘digital’ with an increasing number of open banking initiatives, changing customer behaviours and expectations as the industry moves from a place to reluctance to a quick adoption of digital banking for day-to-day banking needs.
It has been observed in a study by the Bank of International Settlements that fintech use is higher in countries with a younger population, such as India, South Africa and Colombia.
Fintech creates win-win for banks
Interestingly, the rise of fintech, which in many ways is seen as a competition to banks, has paved the way for creating a win-win situation for both fintech and banks. Banks offer services that take years to build and fintech are able to scale up banks’ capacities quickly and cheaply. For banks, there are a plethora of reasons to partner with fintech, but enhancing customer experience is one reason that has been singled out by 86% of banks. This is followed by reducing operations cost and fraudulence, at about 40% priority.
Open banking framework and APIs
Embracing an open banking framework revolves around APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Through APIs, banks are able to have a connected ecosystem and interact with the external world (customers, partners and insurers). APIs have become central to operations of any bank today, not only in helping them embrace the world of open banking but also streamlining their internal as well as external operations.
Banks need to move from ‘reactive’ to ‘robust’ mode
Gartner states that banks need to stop relying on reactive product delivery and start providing a delivery model transformation that uses public and private web APIs and apps. Thus, banks should be able to be move from a reactive to an API-centric approach and while doing so, they need to comply with standards (PCI-DSS, RBI guidelines, GDPR), allow partners to seamlessly onboard themselves and consume APIs effectively to be able to monetize from it. It is essential for banks to have a robust API platform to be able to secure, productize, monetize and analyse APIs to deep-dive into digital banking and meet changing customer demands.
TIBCO API Platform
TIBCO API Platform helps banks in India and around the world to meet their API requirements with its cloud-native, future-proof technology. It delivers full lifecycle API management capabilities for enterprises adopting cloud-native development and deployment practices, such as DevOps, Microservices, and Containers. Its rich set of capabilities includes API creation, productization, security, and analytics of your API program and community of developers. TIBCO Cloud™ Mashery® can be deploy APIs anywhere and can manage APIs from everywhere.
