What’s an API, and What Can it Do for Your Business?
Lately, the acronym API has been featured in the spotlight a lot. Even people who have nothing to do with IT started casually mentioning APIs with knowing looks on their faces.
If you’ve been nodding along without any idea what those guys were talking about, here’s your chance to catch up.
API Explained
An application programming interface, or API, is a piece of software that connects other software, enabling them to communicate with each other.
Picture an API as the cable connecting your computer to the printer. Just like the cable that enables the words you typed into your computer to slide out on a pristine white sheet of paper, an API allows two software platforms to talk to each other.
Why Is It Important
That’s great, you could say, but software do many mysterious things, including talking to each other. What’s the big deal with an API?
Well, you’re partially right. But have you ever tried to get two software from different developers to work together?
Just like a Word document would fall apart on a Mac, many software aren’t able to work together unless specifically asked to do so (aka synchronized).
An API enables software to integrate their functions and work together seamlessly. With a well-functioning API integration, the end-user can’t even notice where one software ends and the other begins.
An Example
The best way to understand what an API does is to examine it in action. Take, for example, business payments.
If your business uses an accounting software, you know how useful it can be for eliminating paperwork and reducing the amount of time you need to spend poring over your invoices. However, what about sending and requesting actual payments?
Without an API, you have to open your payment processing application and deal with the payment from there. Once you’re done, you get back to your accounting software and log all the details.
Boring? Yes. The end of the world? Hardly. But what if you could eliminate all the opening and closing of apps and do everything from one platform?
That’s just what an API allows you to do.
Take Veem’s API, the first API developed with payments in mind. It allows you to integrate global business-to-business payments in all of your business software, including accounting, HR, supply chain, CRM, and logistics platforms.
As Marwan Forzley, founder and CEO at Veem remarked, “we’re opening up the Veem Platform to all applications, making it possible to execute payments between users across the world, something that hasn’t been done before.”
Veem’s API allows you to take care of all your payment needs, whether you send one transaction per month or a thousand. You can even request payments with Veem’s API, or offer it to all of your clients in your marketplace.
Using APIs can help reduce the time you spend trying to get your software to work together. Don’t miss out on an opportunity to eliminate paperwork, and focus on what really matters for your business.
