Consulting firm Innopay has released the latest edition of its Open Banking Monitor, highlighting the latest trends and changes in the rapidly evolving API product landscape. Mounaim Cortet, director at Innopay and lead author of the report, presents three key findings from the report.

Banks advance their API maturity

Compared to last year’s Open Banking Monitor results, banks are offering more APIs, as evidenced by a 17% increase in APIs offered by bank. This increase means that the APIs offered by banks now cover a wider variety of common banking features.

At the top of the list are always account information (for various types of account) and payment initiation (for various payment instruments) and payment management (for various user initiated actions around the payment). Next are customer information APIs (allowing controlled sharing of selected data attributes), which have grown significantly.

Likewise, various enterprise APIs have emerged in the market which have increased efficiency and improved customer experience in transactional banking (e.g. trade finance guarantees, electronic management of bank accounts and real-time cash pooling capabilities).

Developer experience on the rise

On average, developer experience increased by 11%, raising the bar across the landscape. This was motivated by:

Communautary development: 22% increase in banks actively investing in community development efforts through newspaper articles, blogs, events or partnership programs. This indicates that banks recognize the importance of establishing an open banking community to spur innovation.

Ease of use for developers: 21% increase due to additional or enhanced developer tools such as dynamic sandbox features, detailed getting started guides or more comprehensive application management features and credentials, providing a better experience development by making life easier for API users.

API Documentation: 3% increase in features such as API business background information, API version and change management, and API specification conciseness – improved overall readability of documentation API and associated content.

Middle Eastern banks step up their game

Over the past two years, several Middle East-based banks have successfully secured (and advanced) a position in the Open Banking Monitor. AKBank, Arab Bank, IsBank, KuveytTürk, Albaraka and now VakifBank have quickly launched and evolved their open banking proposals.