APIs are used to communicate and collaborate between some of the most powerful systems around the world. More partnerships between the world's platforms means better, more connected ecosystems. Future AIs and tech will need to use APIs to integrate into different interfaces for every part of our day—the home setting, commuting, brick and mortar stores, computers, software applications, and especially finances. In fact, financial APIs make up almost 5% of all APIs today, which is the most with the next largest category being tools at 3.5% and payments again at 3% of all APIs.
Some of the most common APIs come from companies that have relentlessly improved their interfaces to easily gather information. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and not surprisingly, Weather Channel API, a favorite to test with. APIs have become more flexible to present information through different interfaces with white label integrations. Eventually each interface can present its own form of embedded finance, whether it is online checkout, mobile, POS (point of sale), or offering between hundreds of payment methods.
Rapyd is on mission to liberate global commerce with all the tools you need for payments, payouts and business everywhere.
Accept, hold, and disburse funds with various currencies. You can start building to make and move money right now by getting started at https://docs.rapyd.net/build-with-rapyd.
What’s in a Good API?
1. Security
A fintech API should provide robust security features such as encryption, authentication, and authorization to ensure the protection of sensitive financial data.
One of the most important aspects of a good Fintech API is security. Baking in the right levels of security into your fintech to help safely move your customers money, protect your revenue source, and maintain trust in others is essential for your own business and peace of mind.
“Security is an endless practice…It’s changing, it’s shifting, there's always new attacks…someone is getting hacked right now. It’s better if it’s not you…if you focus on a few simple things, the attackers are going to focus on somebody else.” - Nir Rothenberg, CISO, Rapyd.
For each API call, Rapyd uses a signature calculation, or combination of a chain of strings. This signature process helps secure requests by verifying authorized users, protecting data in transition, and rejecting unauthorized persons.
2. Scalability
The API should be able to handle an increasing amount of data and concurrent users without compromising performance.
If you have the right foundation of cloud services, this shouldn’t be a problem. This is also proven to be cheaper than the cost of self-hosted servers. You offer the right products and services to your customers to use. The price of the investments you spend on scalability is to be prepared when the time is needed and give you a peace of mind. Handling all your customers’ transactions who are using your services could mean scaling up to billions or trillions of transactions.
3. Compliance Offering
Although compliance may not be directly a part of the API, it is a critical part of any fintech. Compliance standards should adhere to regulatory requirements, such as GDPR, PSD2, and PCI-DSS, to fulfill local laws and reduce the risk of penalties. These are all intended to protect the parties involved in processing a payment including the consumer, businesses, the processor, or issuer from fraud.
Good compliance is like the strong castle that keeps the enemies out, or the airport TSA that rejects unwanted bad actors from entering. Accepting the right businesses for approval to offer your services is critical to keep others safe, and ultimately guard people from fraudsters.
4. Reliability
Fintech APIs must be highly reliable, providing uptime guarantees and minimizing downtime to ensure seamless access for users.
Reliability is not only building trust with your customers but putting their reputation and trust on the line. 99.99% uptime is essential for a successful API to meet customer expectations and needs. Having one bad interruption can have a devastating impact for your customers, and the perception on your API reliability. Investing in the right backups and API monitoring helps maintain your customers' trust with their end users.
5. Ease of Integration
An API should be easy to integrate with as your customers onboard and begin testing on your platform. You may want to consider API testing platforms like Postman, that allows developers to test your API before fully integrating. Building a community around your developers can have a huge impact on their experience when first experimenting with your sandbox mode.
Ease of integration may not be as dire when it comes to others in onboarding enterprise clients. But it does matter to be able to grow your audience, and capture the interest of anyone who wants to work with a fintech API of your offering.
The Fintech API
The fintech industry as a whole, is layered with multiple services for how money is is moved and stored. Fintech APIs are critical for quickly building and safely communicating information to different platforms. The Rapyd API is an all in one platform to accept, hold, and disburse funds in various countries and currencies. Let’s look at valuable aspects of a fintech API.
1. Payments and Payment/Payout Methods
Providing a range of payment methods is a key consideration expanding your business in multiple countries. This includes traditional payment methods, such as credit/debit card payments and bank transfers, bank redirects, and digital wallets. Having a white labeled API and PCI compliant checkout page option accommodates both MSBs (Money Service Businesses) or customers without a MTL (Money Transmitter License). Either integration should be built for most asynchronous payment flows to handle payments in Europe, APAC with 3DS, or bank transfers, bank redirect, ewallets, and any third party verification.
Rapyd offers hundreds of local payment methods and payout types options to choose from through the Rapyd API direct integration or Hosted Checkout Page. Expand your business to new countries through Rapyd Checkout with cross-border payments and payouts.
2. Settlements and Speed of Transactions
Fintech products should offer fast and secure payment processing and settlements, which are critical for customer satisfaction. In finance, settlements can refer to when you request funds to be withdrawn and deposited into your bank account. When referring to when a transaction becomes readily available in your client account wallet, let’s call this available balance. The product should be designed to ensure speedy transactions and quick settlements for merchants.
Rapyd has a client wallet for each approved account to receive, hold, and disburse funds together with Rapyd Collect and Rapyd Disburse. When transactions are accepted they are sent to the client wallet or can be designated to any created business or personal wallet account. Most transactions take 1-3 days to become an available balance, depending on the payment method. Settlements can be made into a personal or business bank account any time with a minimum of $100 in the client wallet.
3. Account Management and Microservices
Fintech products should offer robust account management features, such as transaction history, balance tracking, and account statements. This helps users keep track of their financial activity and make informed decisions.
Providing microservices, such as APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), can be a valuable addition to fintech products. APIs allow for seamless integration with other financial services, which is critical for companies looking to offer a complete financial ecosystem.
Rapyd offers a dashboard portal for any clients as a hub of all their transactions and account activity. This also includes transaction reporting for reconciliation, settlements, account management, settings, and branding of hosted pages. Further microservices include compliance services for KYB and KYC including digital identity verification.
4. Customer Object
Fintech products should provide excellent customer management, but also have customer objects with unique identifiers, and a thorough list of customer fields. This empowers clients to manage customer information, deal with error handling for customers, save payment methods to the customer, and help with fraud prevention. Having customer objects that are safely passed through the API allows any person to have an easier return visit to make a purchase.
Rapyd includes a Customer Object as well as Customer Payment Method Objects to save to each customer. Customers can also be connected to a wallet object and own funds in your store.
Conclusion
Developing or building on a fintech API requires careful consideration of key aspects, including security, scalability, compliance, reliability, and ease of integration. Furthermore, a competitive fintech offering involves a wide range of payment and payout methods, fast settlements and speed of transactions, comprehensive account management systems, microservices, and key object fields including a customer object to save payment methods.
By ensuring the quality of these areas, you can create and build on fintech APIs that provide a seamless, secure, and efficient financial ecosystem that meets the needs of your customers and businesses alike.
You can get started with the Rapyd API by signing up at dashboard.rapyd.net/sign-up, grabbing your API keys and start testing in Postman by following the steps at Make Your First API Call.
What important aspects do you see in a fintech API? Comment below, or on community.rapyd.net.
Appendix
Definitions
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): Sets principles for how personal data of individuals located in the European Union (EU) is collected, processed, and stored. It aims to protect the privacy and rights of EU citizens by giving them control over their personal data and ensuring that organizations that collect or process their data comply with certain standards and procedures.
PSD2 (Payment Services Directive): sets rules for payment services in the European Union (EU). Its aim is to increase competition, innovation, and security in the payment industry by opening it up to new players and technologies. The PSD2 requires payment service providers to meet certain standards and procedures, such as strong customer authentication, transparency in pricing and service quality, and protection of customer data.
PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards): The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) is a set of security standards developed by major credit card companies to protect against credit card fraud and data breaches. The purpose to ensure that all organizations that handle credit card information maintain a secure environment and follow a set of requirements for safeguarding sensitive information
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