Foreign Financial Businesses Quick to Adopt Open APIs to Their Businesses

Although South Korea was late in adopting open banking system, top foreign financial businesses and major corporations have already adopted open APIs (Application Programming Interface) to their businesses and are introducing unprecedented services.
TESOBE from Germany introduced a banking API project that can be used by a business to develop innovative applications and services.
Its banking API is based on transaction data of account holders and it expresses transaction data in a simple and uniform manner by abstracting characteristics of each banking system.
Multinational financial group called BBVA from Spain provides an API that gathers and utilizes statistics on consumption made by people. ‘BBVA DATA API’ collects and analyzes information on particular transactions during banking activities and converts such information into valuable information. It provides various services such as merchant category, basic statistics, information on addresses of customers, age distribution, payment distribution, patterns of consumption, and patterns of credit card usage. BBVA operates a developer center based on a motto ‘banking outside of a bank’ to operate its APIs more effectively.
Fidor Bank, a German internet-only bank, applied an API module called ‘Fidor OS’ on top of its core banking system. It established a business model that is linked to community management, comprehensive account, mileage management, and foreign remittance and it modualized these services. It also introduced services with many partners. It provided checking account, savings account, and short-term loan based on API and it also introduce foreign remittance service along with a FinTech company called CurrencyCloud. It recently commercialized wire transfer and payment services using Bitcoin.
Mambu, a Germany digital banking platform provider, introduced Cloud-based open platform that can quickly create loan and savings products. Through this open platform, it provides various functions such as loan management, account transaction, customer management, workflow, and process control and it also introduced a toolkit for developers. Its platform allows VAN (Value Added Network) businesses, PG (Payment Gateway) businesses, ATM network, and banking agents to quickly combine businesses through open API.
Staff Reporter Gil, Jaeshik | osolgil@etnews.com