July 2019 Summaries

This blog post announces the addition of support for GraphQL schema export from APIMatic using API Transformer, enabling developers to migrate their existing APIs to GraphQL more easily. The new feature allows users to convert their SOAP or REST APIs to a GraphQL schema file, which can then be used to generate server code and resolver signatures. The conversion process supports various formats such as OpenAPI, RAML, and API Blueprint, and follows best practices for GraphQL schema design. For SOAP users, the migration involves converting WSDL types to GraphQL schema types, operations to mutations, and attributes to arguments. For REST users, the conversion wraps operation parameters in a GraphQL input type and links it to respective query/mutation arguments. The blog post also discusses the benefits of using GraphQL, such as its simplicity, speed, and efficiency, making it an attractive option for developers looking to modernize their APIs.

The Banking and Finance industry is heavily regulated, but the rise of FinTech companies has brought about significant changes with the use of APIs, allowing developers to build custom solutions on top of them. This shift is putting pressure on traditional banking organizations to keep up with customer demands for advanced experiences. The European Parliament's Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) and Open Banking initiatives are driving this change, requiring banks to make their data and services available to third-party developers. To succeed, banks need to focus on developer experience, providing easy-to-use APIs that can be consumed quickly and efficiently. Automation is key to scaling developer experience, allowing API teams to generate documentation, SDKs, code samples, and CI/CD pipelines with minimal effort.

FinTech startups have leveraged Web APIs to dominate the financial services industry, while traditional institutes are following suit by implementing strategies like Open Banking initiatives to expose their services. To ensure effective use of these APIs, developers need a great developer experience. The study analyzed popular APIs from both Open Banking and FinTech spaces using a Developer Experience checklist endorsed by industry experts. The list of APIs includes Barclays APIs, Nordea Bank, Citi APIs, Deutsche Bank, Stripe, Square, Visa, and CoinAPI. Each API was evaluated based on its publicly available resources, including developer portals, product pages, documentation, and components. Citibank's API program offers 11 APIs with a beautiful landing page, easy registration, and an in-depth overview of each API. Deutsche Bank provides around 9 APIs with advanced security protocols and a customer story to explain common use cases. Nordea Open Banking offers one of the best onboarding techniques with training videos, Swagger collections, and sample code. Barclays' API program is one of the largest in the industry with over 12 well-maintained APIs and a developer portal that delivers a great experience. Square provides an easy-to-integrate service with great developer experience, while Stripe offers one of the best if not the absolute best developer experience in the FinTech space, onboarding non-developer decision makers and providing pre-built plug-ins and extensions. Visa's Developer Center is one of the most beautiful platforms seen, communicating with users through rich messaging and visuals. CoinAPI combines data from all virtual currency exchanges and provides incredible utility to cryptocurrency traders with ease in consuming its API.