The Importance of Open Finance APIs for Developers in FinTech
- Samuel Feldman
- Aug 13, 2021
- 4 min read
API keys are the future for FinTech, and major players are already making moves to develop and improve online banking entirely.
(image credit: crowdstrike.com)
What is an API Key?
An API key, or application programming interface key, is a code that gets passed in by computer applications. The program or application then calls the API to identify its user, developer, or calling program to a website. These keys are typically used to track and control how the interface is being utilized and prevent abuse or malicious use.
When and Why to Use API Keys
An API key can act as a secret authentication token as well as a unique identifier. Typically, the key will come with a set of access rights for the API that it is associated with. This allows the developer to use API keys for projects that require designated authentication tokens for the user. It is important to note that:
Authentication tokens are used to identify the users.
API keys are used to identifying the project making the call.
This allows fintech developers to create apps with API keys to ensure proper project authorization to check whether the application making the call has access to call it, and project identification which identifies the project or application making the call to the API. With this type of user authentication enabled, fintech apps and neobanks are able to create systems to make sure users have the proper permissions to use the services provided in these apps and are who they say they are.
One such company that provides open finance API keys is Brick. Brick is a fintech API provider allowing Southeast Asian tech companies to offer in-app financial services with a single line of code. Brick offers account aggregation, identity verification, and income verification services that allows tech companies to instantly supercharge their apps with personalized and inclusive financial services. I had the opportunity to sit down with Gavin Tan, CEO, and Co-Founder of Brick, to discuss the future of this valuable startup.
What was your inspiration behind Brick?
I have been an operator in fintech and helping scale high-growth fintechs for over 6+ years. This is my third fintech startup. The first fintech startup I joined was a Southeastern Asian banking startup called OOjiBOO, and we built out digital banking software into Indochina banks on E-money infrastructure. We did everything from building a digital call banking system to operating the agent network for the banks. I eventually joined the Aspire team as one of the early executive hires hitting up regulatory strategy and banking partnerships in Southeastern Asia. So when I was scaling Aspire, I experienced firsthand the painpoint of fintech in Southeast Asia, which was not having access to good financial APIs to quickly and easily launch the fintech experiences we want to but could not. Many of our processes were extremely inefficient and prone to fraud and even completed manually in some cases. At Aspire, we looked for banking data API providers to streamline these processes, but we could not find a satisfactory partner. My friends from other startups were also asking why basic financial APIs don’t exist. Eventually, I thought it was a no-brainer; everybody needs this service in Southeast Asia. So I ended up working on a new startup to solve my own problem, and a problem many of us were facing in the industry.
How would you describe the open banking API space, and how do you see yourself in that space?
The open banking space falls into three categories: data aggregation, open banking, banking as a service. Where we operate as Brick is as an API aggregator for Data APIs and Payment APIs in Southeast Asia. Our closest global comparable would be Truelayer, which does aggregation for both Data APIs and Payment APIs.
What are the products you offer to developers?
The first big product we started offering was data aggregation APIs. These data aggregation APIs allows developers to easily sync data from any digital financial account, whether it is a bank account, e-wallet, government social security account, and even e-commerce accounts. We recently launched verification APIs that allows any tech company to easily verify the owner of a particular bank account and the location of the user. The next product that we plan to launch is our disbursement API. This allows any tech company to efficiently disburse money to any bank account in Indonesia with a simple API dashboard that does not need any training for operation teams to use.
How do they differ from other competitors in the market?
For all our APIs, we focus on bringing a developer-first experience to developers in Southeast Asia. Today, many API companies require developers to go through and book times, often waiting two weeks to speak to representatives before getting their API keys and testing the product. Since we have a fully digital self-serve funnel, any developer can come to our website, sign up immediately, and start building immediately without any representatives required. In addition to the great developer experience, we also have many developer tools to make the integration experience as easy as possible. This includes a great dashboard, clear API documentation in all sorts of programming languages. So our integration is as easy as copypasting lines of code.
The other feature we provide versus older players in the market is we focus not just on banking data but also on alternative financial data. The reason why we do this is because only 25% of adults in Southeast Asia regularly use a bank account. The rest of the adults may have opened a banking account but rarely use one, opting for cash assets or other electronic accounts instead. This is why we have decided to heavily invest in coverage for e-wallets which are very popular in Southeast Asia, and also connections to social security data, which contains a lot of valuable data.
What are your future goals and ambitions for the company?
The goal for Brick is to be the financial API supermarket for Southeast Asia. Any developer in Southeast Asia that would like to build a fintech app or launch a fintech feature would think of us. Hopefully, we can fully expand and provide this service for all major countries in Southeast Asia in the next couple of years.
Gavin Tan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Brick. A leading voice for Southeastern Asia’s booming FinTech schene, Gavin has worked for startups such as OOjiBO, and Aspire, before starting Brick to serve the needs of fintech developers. Currently, Gavin resides in Singapore where he continues to develop Brick and helping developers alike.
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