5 Fintech & Infrastructure APIs and Technologies Every Developer Should Know
Fintech, short for Financial Technology, is used to describe startups and companies that seek to develop new tech to improve and automate the financial services industry. The global fintech market was valued at roughly $127.66 billion in 2018 and is expected to grow to $309.98 billion by 2022—an annual growth rate of 24.8%. With an increasing amount of consumers optimizing for mobile, banks and other financial service organizations are realizing the need to adapt.
Developers in fintech are rapidly developing new technologies to satisfy demand. The following five APIs and technologies are great tools for any developer to use when building in the fintech space.
- Twilio: for call/text/video
Twilio is a cloud communications platform that has democratized communication channels like voice, text, chat and video with simple web service APIs. Using Twilio, any developer, at any skill level, is given the ability to communicate with their customers in a variety of ways.
2. Alpaca: for securities (U.S. stocks)
Alpaca gives developers the ability to build and connect applications and/or algorithms to buy and sell stocks with zero commissions. Developers can use the Alpaca API to integrate trading functionality as middleware into a new or existing app or platform.
3. Very Good Security: for data security
Very Good Security’s software offers companies the ability to store their users’ data in a secure digital vault, with easy access for editing and processing. Their service also replaces sensitive data, like credit card or social security numbers, with an alias. This service acts like a “life hack” for end-to-end compliance—without aggressive engineering budgets.
4. Teller: for real-time banking
Teller is an API for bank accounts, similar to Plaid. However, Plaid employs a screen-scraping technique to get transaction data, meaning developers only receive updates periodically throughout the day. Instead of screen-scraping, Teller connects developers directly and instantaneously to the transaction. Their API allows developers to build applications that connect directly with their user’s bank accounts. This allows tools that move money, make payments and view transactions much more reliable, predictable and performant.
5. CryptoMove: for infosec
CryptoMove is a cloud-native key vault and secrets management platform that provides moving target defense (MTD) for microservices and multi-cloud platforms. They are changing the paradigm of data security with MTD—breaking down data into chunks and continuously moving the “broken data” around to make it harder for hackers to gain access. CryptoMove also circulates API keys through their distributed system at a high speed. Overall, they enable a new type of defense that is very difficult to hack.
Technology and services are offered by AlpacaDB, Inc. Brokerage services are provided by Alpaca Securities LLC (alpaca.markets), member FINRA/SIPC. Alpaca Securities LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of AlpacaDB, Inc.
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