Article by Elena Mesropyan
Banking APIs constitute the core of innovative approach to building financial products. Enabling access to data for all relevant participants of the market creates an opportunity for each of them to build a superior offering as well as for consumers to make better choices of financial products.
As the Competition and Markets Authority states in the report on retail banking, APIs “make life simpler for millions of us every day by enabling us to share information, for example, about our location. They are the hidden technological drivers behind digital applications such as Facebook, Google Maps and Uber.”
A variety of banking APIs providers has expanded opportunities for entrepreneurs to build solutions for different segments of the financial services industry:
Financial data aggregators are some of the most interesting elements of financial APIs ecosystem as they drive valuable insights on customers’ financial behavior and enable a data-driven approach to building financial products. Financial data aggregators also comprise the basis of a responsible approach to personal finance management and are in the foundation of consumer-empowering products.
Over the past several years, FinTech innovators have been enriching the banking APIs list with exquisite examples of advanced solutions aimed to empower financial institutions and customers. In fact, the concept of open API approach became one of the centerpieces of innovation in the financial services industry largely because of the companies we will be speaking of further.
Banking APIs are known to enable banking customers – through a single application – to manage accounts held with several providers. They also allow customers to authorize the movement of funds between current and deposit accounts to help avoid overdraft charges or to benefit from higher interest payments. They let customers make simple, safe and reliable price and service quality comparisons tailored to their own usage patterns.
For businesses/institutions, banking APIs allow to monitor a current account and forecast a customer’s cash flow. Using businesses’ transaction history, API providers allow a potential lender to reliably assess business’s creditworthiness and offer better lending deals than they would without this information.
Leading providers of data aggregation APIs:
Kontomatik offers a read-only API for financial institutions, enabling them to import personal data, account balances and full statements from any supported bank to their system. To do that, Kontomatik uses end-user bank credentials (a bank login and password). The solution ensures top-notch security as Kontomatik servers store very little data. Bank passwords are never stored and financial data is removed ASAP (financial data is removed from Kontomatik servers in a 24-hour moving window. API clients, however, can force data removal at any time). Kontomatik API requires two-factor authentication based on an API key and IP whitelist.
Kontomatik supports all major banks in ten countries on three continents and is ready to develop APIs for other countries upon request. Kontomatik supports the accessing of personal data of the account owners, current and saving accounts and transaction history from those accounts.
Under the hood, Kontomatik o mimics a human using a Web browser. By using the very same protocol as a Web browser, Kontomatik can potentially support any bank worldwide in a permissionless way. Kontomatik does not need agreements with all the supported banks as it exemplifies permissionless innovation. Kontomatik natively supports hardware tokens, SMS codes, mobile-application-generated one-time passwords, CAPTCHA pictures, anti-phishing pictures and other types of user authentication
Kontomatik is known for speed among competing solutions because the company does not run a farm of headless browsers and does not run any JavaScript as well as not download any assets. Kontomatik reverse engineers how HTTP requests are put together and then recreates them directly in Java with no overhead.
Among the banks supported by Kontomatik technology in various countries are Deutsche Bank, mBank, Raiffeisen Bank, Santander, Citibank, HSBC, BBVA, Scotiabank, Alpha Bank, Lloyds, Barclays, etc. Kontomatik is the fastest-growing banking API provider and has been distinguished by BBVA among the three most interesting examples in the data aggregation APIs segment. Next to this, Kontomatik has been defined as one of the five most useful APIs in the financial world by Huffington Post.
Xignite APIs are used by over 40 startups with the clientele including companies such as Betterment, Wealthfront, Personal Capital, Yodlee, Oracle, SAS, Sungard, Charles Schwab, Navy Federal Credit Union, TD Ameritrade, Brinks, GE and Starbucks.
A particular API of the company called the ‘FactSet Fundamentals’ is one of the first REST-based APIs to provide accurate and trusted historical financials, fundamentals, earnings and more across more than 170 global exchanges. FactSet Fundamentals joins more than 40 other APIs for financial services in Xignite’s API library. APIs from Xignite provide back-end data integration, powering a lot of financial service ventures.
Plaid gives developers the tools to integrate with bank infrastructure and the ability to access and authorize user bank accounts. Plaid offers two primary products through its APIs that allow users and developers to effortlessly interact with financial institutions: Plaid ACH Auth and Plaid Connect.
Plaid Connect allows developers to dig into the narrative by collecting transactional data from credit, debit, checking, savings and more accounts in a clean, usable format. It intelligently matches the merchant name, category, location and address of each purchase.
The Germany-based bank offers a standardized set of RESTful APIs and management systems handled with OAuth for authentication. With Fidor, each user can receive a specific customer ID and associated bank account. Deploying the Fidor API, requests can be made for third party payments or transfers. Single transactions, as well as batch transfers or direct debit withdrawals, can be made using a single API-driven procedure. Web-based requests can be made to retrieve user information such as ID & customer email. The API enables developers to access general account management features.
Fidor combines a full banking license with its own technology and open bank APIs. The fidorOS has been designed to work with an existing core banking system and is expandable beyond traditional banking services. The banking platform is a middleware that provides support for social trading and lending, virtual currencies and emergency loans without being tied to any legacy code.
Figo Connect API allows to easily access bank accounts including transaction history and submitting payments. Bank accounts are the central domain object of this API and the main anchor point for many of the other resources. This API does not only consider classical bank accounts as accounts but also alternative banking services, e.g. credit cards or PayPal. The API does not distinguish between these two in most cases.
Figo Connect is a completely RESTful API and aims to follow as many best practices as possible. The API and its online tools are only available via HTTPS. In addition, its SDKs employ certificate pinning to validate the certificate of the API server to extend beyond the SSL trust chain.
Yodlee Interactive, a division of Yodlee, builds APIs to help customers bring innovative FinApps to market more quickly using rich consumer transactional data. It primarily offers the following two APIs: Instant Account Verification API and Aggregation API, which enables developers to get access to randomized and securitized bank data through the ability to aggregate accounts, whether it’s an investment account, a bank account, a credit card account, a rewards account, an insurance account or some other account.
Besides the above two, the company has launched an Enterprise API, custom-built and co-branded for individual financial institutions. Yodlee’s API also allows geolocation information to be added to financial data. Yodlee developers launched a new set of restful APIs called “FastLink” that helps a user link multiple bank accounts and cards in one place with an easy drag and drop feature at the back-end.
Pich is banking and financial data provider. The company organizes, collects and aggregates this data for businesses and developers so that they can use it in their services. With the help of Pich’s API, the user can quickly integrate to the banking infrastructure and benefit from the reliable data of these financial institutions.
Pick Link API allows aggregating user-mandated data from accounts across multiple financial institutions. The Pich API provides business and developers with reliable, clean, and enriched transaction data in a machine-readable format. Pich maintains a dormant connection that becomes active the next time the user accesses the application, providing them with the most up-to-date information associated with the account.
Instantor provides online identification and financial data reports based on real-time technology, giving insight to customer’s financial situation (i.e. salary level, spending habits, payday loans, other credits and gambling, etc.) over the last 12 months. This is done through a connection to the bank in which the customer is a client.
The Open Bank Project is an open-source API and app store for banks that empower financial institutions to securely and rapidly enhance their digital offerings using an ecosystem of third-party applications and services.
The Open Bank Project offers an easy-to-use RESTful JSON API that can be connected in minutes to enable integration of bank account information via REST API and use of secure authentication via OAuth implementation. The Open Bank Project exposes transaction data in a simple and consistent structure by abstracting away the peculiarities of each banking system. This is achieved by “connectors” that interface between the OBP API and each core banking system. This enables application developers to write an app once, and use it for many banks.
The Open Bank Project API supports transparency services via multiple configurable views on transaction data so that, for instance, the public may see most details of an NGO’s transactions whilst still preserving privacy where required. It also supports transaction data enrichment: comments, tags and images may be added to transactions by authorized users, creating a dialogue around the data.
Spectre API by Salt Edge
Salt Edge provides account data aggregation, automatic categorization, customer-oriented money management, screen scraping software, omnichannel banking solutions with client analysis and targeted marketing.
Spectre API by Salt Edge is designed both for startups and innovative enterprises who need permission-based access and bank-level security to access their customers’ multiple account types including checking, savings, credit cards, e-wallets, money-market accounts, prepaid cards, investments, insurance, loans and mortgages.
Source: Let’s Talk Payments
Partners with ESG Book to Drive Investor Sustainability Engagement
SAN MATEO, Calif., April 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Xignite, Inc., the leading provider of market data APIs to brokers and wealth managers, announced the launch of a new Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data API in partnership with ESG Book, a global leader in ESG data and technology. Xignite's brokerage, wealth, and media customers can now increase user engagement and retention with state-of-the-art sustainability trading products.
As ESG investment has gone mainstream, today's digital investors, institutional investors, and corporations alike require ESG data to help them answer questions that range from a company's workforce diversity to its commitment to a net zero future. In this context, brokers and wealth managers can use ESG data to increase client engagement around their portfolios and differentiate their offerings in a very fragmented marketplace.
"We are thrilled to extend our highly scalable and advanced API platform to include ESG Book's real-time sustainability dataset. With the recent SEC announcement of proposals for climate disclosure, the momentum for sustainability data in the U.S. just keeps on building. If you do not offer ESG data and portfolio analytics to your clients today, you will run into growth and retention challenges," said Stéphane Duboi, the CEO of Xignite.
Dr Daniel Klier, CEO of ESG Book, said: "As capital markets transition towards a more sustainable, net-zero future, demand for accessible, comparable and transparent ESG data has never been higher. We are delighted to be partnering with Xignite, a global leader in API solutions, to deliver our real-time ESG data products to clients at both speed and scale through the latest cloud technology."
Xignite's new ESG API is designed to fast track the launch of ESG powered products. Transparent, well-structured and easy to understand ESG datasets eliminate the need for robust in-house ESG expertise. Advanced screener endpoints further simplify development by eliminating the need to maintain a database.
XigniteGlobalESG API covers a comprehensive universe of public companies domiciled in North America, EMEA, APAC, and Latin America. In addition to ESG scores, this API provides Global Compact scores, involvement data, temperature scores, and raw emissions data.
About Xignite
Xignite is the leading provider of market data API solutions to brokers, wealth managers, and the tech firms who serve them. Xignite has been disrupting the market data industry from Silicon Valley since 2003 when it introduced the first commercial REST API. Today, more than 700 firms use Xignite's APIs more than half a trillion times a month to deliver high-value data to digital investors. Visit xignite.com or follow us on Twitter @xignite.
About ESG Book
ESG Book is a global leader in sustainability data and technology. Through a cloud-based platform, ESG Book makes sustainability data more widely available and comparable for all stakeholders, enables companies to be custodians of their own data, provides framework-neutral ESG information in real-time, and promotes transparency. It counts many of the world's leading financial organisations among its clients, which collectively manage over $120 trillion in assets. www.esgbook.com
04/12/2022
Sales Up 50%. API Volumes Now Exceed Half a Trillion per Month.
Xignite, Inc., the leading provider of market data APIs to brokers and wealth managers, announced that 2021 was a banner year for its business. Xignite experienced more than 50% growth in new client bookings over 2020. Most of this growth was fueled by heavy demand from new brokerage and wealth management applications as more firms entered the business. Xignite also saw a 53% increase in API consumption to a whopping half a trillion requests a month - driven mainly by increased activity from digital investors as they consumed more and more data during the pandemic.
The Digital Investor Revolution was created by the convergence of zero-cost trading, fractional shares, working from home, the pandemic, and the emergence of a new and more powerful generation of retail investors. This has created significant momentum in trading and wealth management, primarily US-based equity and options trading. And it has fueled the entrance of a considerable number of new prominent players in the field, especially embedded finance providers. It all came to light in early 2021 with the Reddit and Gamestop phenomenon. But it has not proven to be short-lived. The transformation could be profound. Indeed Xignite saw its momentum accelerate in Q4-2021, with bookings growth exceeding 310% over the same quarter in 2020.
“Xignite is one of the oldest and most scalable commercial API infrastructures globally. It’s not a surprise that our clients have grown to rely on us for their mission-critical business needs,” says Stephane Dubois, Xignite’s CEO and Founder. “It’s not only the mind-numbing volumes that we have to deal with,” adds Dubois, “It’s also the 4-nine+ level of availability we deliver day in and day out coupled with the awesome market data quality and the high touch responsiveness of our support teams. These metrics matter to large embedded finance firms entering the business or legacy firms migrating to the cloud. They spend tens of millions of dollars entering the business. They don’t want to see it evaporate because of poor data quality or API availability.”
About Xignite
Xignite powers the investing apps and services that enable millions of people to manage their portfolios and trade stocks from a phone or tablet with the industry’s best financial market data APIs. We help more than 700 fintech trading, investment, and analytics firms like Robinhood, SoFi, and Betterment provide digital investors with the market data they need, such as real-time stock prices and company news. Visit xignite.com or follow on Twitter @xignite.
03/10/2022
Xignite, Inc., the leading provider of market data APIs to brokers and wealth managers, announced the launch of a new cryptocurrency data API. Xignite’s brokerage, wealth, and media customers can now increase the value and stickiness of their services to digital investors by taking advantage of the depth and breadth of data offered by this API.
Investment in cryptocurrencies has increased dramatically over the last few years and has proven to draw new investors into the world of trading. As a result, brokerage companies are trying hard to make buying, selling, and holding Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Dogecoin (DOGE), and other cryptocurrencies as easy as possible for their clients. The XigniteCrypto API is the first to bring together a vast universe of cryptocurrency information alongside the equity, ETF, and option data brokers and fund managers need to offer high-quality services to their clients. It also provides the depth of functionality required for them to engage customers and drive trading activity
“Cryptocurrencies tend to operate in their own world,” said Stephane Dubois, CEO, and Founder of Xignite. “This means that if you want to offer integrated equity, option, and crypto trading or analytics for your clients, you are going to have to cobble up a lot of heterogeneous data from many disparate sources, and that’s a pain,” adds Dubois. “With our new crypto API, you get the depth of coverage, the quality, and the reliability across all asset classes you need to grow your business - all in one integrated solution.”
Xignite’s new cryptocurrency API, XigniteCrypto, provides real-time and historical quotes for over 900 cryptocurrencies, including coins and tokens. It includes unique API endpoints that help firms engage digital investors, using the data and tools they need to make crypto trading decisions, including price alerts, historical charting, currency conversion, and cryptocurrency news.
About Xignite
Xignite is the leading provider of market data API solutions to brokers, wealth managers, and the tech firms who serve them. Xignite has been disrupting the market data industry from Silicon Valley since 2003, when it introduced the first commercial REST API. Since then, Xignite has continually taken advantage of new technologies to help its clients grow their business and serve their customers better by using financial market data effectively. Today, more than 700 firms use Xignite’s APIs more than half a trillion times a month to deliver high-value data to digital investors. Visit xignite.com or follow on Twitter @xignite.
02/15/2022
Xignite, Inc., a cloud-based market data distribution and management solutions provider for financial services and technology companies, announced a new Vendor of Record service for clients subscribing to real-time and delayed market data. The new service vastly simplifies the administration and reporting required by exchanges and often eliminates the need to pay redistribution fees, potentially saving clients thousands of dollars a month.
As an approved Vendor of Record, also called a Service Facilitator, Xignite can redistribute real-time and delayed equities and options pricing data from Nasdaq, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA), OTC Markets (OTCM), and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX).
Adhering to the complex compliance guidelines required by exchanges is extremely difficult for investment advisers, financial advisers, or order management software providers that need to display real-time or delayed data. Each exchange has its own unique set of regulations and compliance requirements, and clients need to prove that they have control over who receives the data, in what format, and for what use case. Xignite’s Vendor of Record service eliminates the administrative burden of tracking these complex compliance requirements.
The new service utilizes Xignite’s cloud-native Entitlements and Usage Microservices to give firms complete control and transparency of their data consumption and usage. Xignite provides data entitlements, usage tracking, and exchange reporting across various data sets, users, and applications to ensure exchange compliance. Xignite’s new service sometimes eliminates the need to pay expensive redistribution fees. Exchange fees for display data, regardless of the number of users, can cost upwards of $10,000 per month. These high fees are especially difficult for smaller financial firms with just a few real-time data users.
“Maneuvering through the maze of required compliance policies, entitlements, usage tracking, and reporting requirements, and being subjected to frequent audits is no easy feat,” said Vijay Choudhary, Head of Product for Xignite. “Xignite’s mission is to “Make Market Data Easy.” Today’s announcement is another step towards this. We are taking away the administrative burdens and complexity of licensing market data and allowing our clients the freedom to focus on their investment and trading strategies and building innovative products.”
Xignite’s Vendor of Record service is available for professional users with internal and display-only use cases. The service is available now as an add-on service for subscribers of our real-time and delayed equities and options pricing data APIs. These include:
About Xignite
Xignite has been disrupting the financial and market data industry from its Silicon Valley headquarters since 2003 when it introduced the first commercial REST API. Since then, Xignite has continually refined its technology to help Fintech and financial institutions get the most value from their data. Today, more than 700 clients access over 500 cloud-native APIs to build efficient and cost-effective enterprise data management solutions. Visit xignite.com or follow on Twitter @xignite.
09/21/2021
