API’s Journey
Hello everyone and welcome to my two cents of thoughts publication.
in this article, I will be discussing about APIs and the programmable economy. Hopefully, the journey that Bank Mandiri already embarked on will give you some ideas on how to harness the potential benefit and implement the APIs technology within your organization.
A little background of my self, my name is Rully Feranata and my current role as an Enterprise Architecture at Bank Mandiri. I’ve been in charge of Mandiri Middleware Transformation program and API for the last three years and the journey itself doesn’t stop there…
For a moment I’d like to borrow an interesting quote from Margaret J. Wheatley, She’s an American writer that has published several books such as “Claiming Leadership”, “Restoring Sanity”, and other titles as well, that focus on leadership and new economy area.
“There’s no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about”.
This quote has inspired me and relevant to the API context today, which nowadays everyone, every entity are connected. The information can be accessed anywhere, anyplace, anytime, even as we speak right now. Perhaps currently you are googling me or Margaret to get some profile using any device at your fingertips.
So to create a better community or ecosystem, you need to discover what relevant needs and drivers that make them change that’s what API’s really about.
In the financial ecosystem and this new digital economy, we’ve seen and have been using, perhaps two or more of these digital apps in our everyday life. May it be shopping for some personal stuff in an e-commerce app, book a flight or as simple as booking a ride using GoJek or Grab app. Even for more complex as asking for a loan for your financial goals. It introduces a new kind of economy (New Economy: Investopedia-2017) wherein the traditional ways, the barrier to entry is thick enough compares to nowadays where lots of new players are easily entering the market although providing the same product or services as we speak. It’s embedded in everyday activities.
So, what’s the impact on the financial industry especially banks, with this New Economy concept today?
Previously. most of us know in traditional old banking ways, whereby banks need to establish a physical branch, like “brick and mortar” to reaching out the customer closely also each product or services are build and deployed specifically to the channel capability, hence we are building the “vertically integrated value chain” from the perspective of the bank not the customer point of view.
And as for the current banking business model, the approach will be more like establishing virtual banking that focuses on banking services through digital channels and already customer-oriented.
With this new digital ecosystem in place, banking services no longer proprietary to the bank and now we’ve seen payment can be delivered by this digital apps, lending can be accessed and provided by the P2P platform that unites the borrower and lender, and lots of other banking services apart from saving and time deposit can be delivered by this digital apps, therefore banks have to transformed them self into a new model by which what we call “bank as a service” whereby banks need to integrate all of this value chain horizontally within the ecosystem not only financial services but cross-industry as well. To bring a new and enhanced customer experience for financial services as well as other industry, the “invisible banking” perhaps the better term for Banking 2025 vision introduced by the American Bankers Association (www.americanbanker.com/news/the-rise-of-the-invisible-bank) with the combination of other emerging technology such as artificial intelligence, IoT, with collaboration of using APIs.
(To be continued…)
