Issue link: https://go.axway.com/i/1137349
The Banking Integration Stack Banks are beginning to look at using existing technologies including open source to weave into their infrastructure stacks, but the consumption of third party APIs is low. Does your business use APIs from other providers (N=41) KYC/Identity Telecommunications Email Fraud tools Credit scoring External Maps Business Exchange rate Sentiment Weather Other ML/AI Real estate Other ML/AI 0 4 2 6 8 10 Use of open source technologies Don't know 9.8% It will be mandatory to have open source parts in the solution 14.8% We are open to using open source technologies 59% We will invest only in open source 9.8% We will not use open source 4.9% Other 1.6% Strangely, bank survey respondents were not high consumers of external APIs. Apart from KYC/Identity APIs and some fraud tools, usage was fairly low. (This would suggest that those 26 respondents that indicated they are using Postman as part of their API lifecycle toolkit may be doing so for testing of their own APIs rather than to validate consumption of external APIs.) These survey findings were confirmed in banking executive interviews, with few interviewees highlighting any specific external consumption of APIs. This could also help explain the slow uptake of open banking APIs amongst the majority of banks: without an internal API culture that consumes APIs and understands the value of APIs, there is little enthusiasm for identifying business use cases amongst one's own web services. This may change with the current gravitation towards open source technologies. 60% of survey respondents are open to using open source, which was also reflected in one-to-one interviews, with one quarter (24.6%) believing their organization will either mandate use of open source or significantly invest in open source tech, while only 4.9% were sure that their institution would not invest in open source. One banking executive noted: "We have an open-source first policy: Before we look anywhere else, we look in the open source community for technology solutions, as they are often the leaders." Another banking executive shared how they moved towards a build rather than buy culture internally: "We came to the conclusion that the market was volatile, tech is shifting very quickly. Partially out of that volatility, our VP of architecture said screw it, we are going to get a team of open source experts to look at best of breed open source. We will go cloud native, be friendly with GitHub, Jira, Slack, and Jenkins, and see what we can do in a cloud mode compatible with AWS and Azure. We decided we want to try and compose something rather than build from scratch…" 25 The BanKIng InTegRaTIOn STacK