Acme, a large bank undergoing digital transformation, faces significant challenges in managing its sprawling tech landscape, characterized by legacy systems and siloed engineering teams. The bank's efforts to migrate to the cloud and adopt a consistent API and microservices-driven approach are hampered by manual processes and inconsistent standards, leading to inefficiencies, high costs, compliance issues, and security risks, as exemplified by a data breach affecting 15 million customer accounts. The API Platform team is overwhelmed by the volume of new APIs needing review, resulting in delays and decreased morale, while the Mobile team, in a rush to release a new Open Banking application, bypasses governance processes, leading to inconsistent and hard-to-use APIs. Acme's struggles highlight the need for APIOps, an approach that automates the full API lifecycle by incorporating DevOps and GitOps philosophies to enhance speed, quality, and scalability, ensuring the organization can innovate sustainably and effectively leverage APIs as business enablers.