eXate's Co-Founder and CEO, Peter Lancos, recently had an article published in the Journal of Digital Banking discussing the future of digital banking and the role APIs and DataSecOps has to play.
The Journal of Digital Banking is the major professional journal publishing in-depth, peer-reviewed articles and case studies on FinTech innovation, digital disruption and how to develop a profitable, customer-focused digital banking strategy – specifically by using technology and automation to deliver efficient, secure and seamless customer experiences with lower operating costs.
Read the article's Abstract below - and to download the entire article for free simply click the image...
ABSTRACT
Digital banking involves high levels of process automation and web-based
services and may include application programming interfaces (APIs) enabling cross-institutional service composition to deliver banking products and provide transactions. It enables users to have access to their financial data via their digital devices. APIs represent as great a threat and an opportunity to banks today as the advent of the digital era once
did, opening the market to greater competition around customer loyalty and engagement.
Banks should not consider these APIs as simply technical interfaces that expose data to
third parties but rather as radical enablers of new and attractive customer experiences. APIs
are already commonplace across many industry sectors, where they are, in fact, viewed
as customer products. Banks will have to follow suit in order to remain competitive. In
brief, APIs are the nucleus of digital transformation. Around 84.5 per cent of those working
on digital transformation initiatives state that APIs are playing a significant role in those
initiatives.1 Given the risk of API-first architecture, these numbers are expected to continue
to grow. There are risks, however, that companies face as a result of the increased reliance
on APIs as the main driver of digital banking. Seventy one per cent of software engineers
surveyed considered ‘security’ the most important factor to consider before integration with
an API, which was tied for the top concern.2 While software engineers are aware of this
risk, there is a need to address it not only at a technology level, but at a risk and business
level as well. In order to address these risks, the concept of Data Security Operations, or
‘DataSecOps’, has arisen. DataSecOps is a discipline that empowers software engineers,
data scientists, governance risk and control, cybersecurity & operations teams to
work together in a single application for safer and easier access, analysis, delivery and
governance of data.3 DataSecOps principles will become a critical component in addressing the security issues related to digital banking.