What is Developer Experience in API Banking?
An overview of the key pillars of developer experience that financial institutions participating in open banking and developing API-based offerings, should focus on.
World-over, financial institutions are leveraging ecosystem partnerships to scale innovation, and realize their digital potential. And as they move further along the open banking roadmap, relationships with ecosystem partners and technology providers become increasingly important.
It is not just internal teams, but a variety of partners who work with banks and traditional financial institutions to use their API-based offerings – including third-party service providers, technology providers, ecosystem partners, and government bodies. This has significant implications on how banks think about Developer Experience – and necessitates a holistic, strategic approach to DX, because the cost of poor DX is high!
Key pillars of DX Strategy for API Banking
A partner’s experience during an API partnership with a bank extends beyond the technical integration.
To design a distinctive developer experience, the starting point is designing the best-in-class developer journey across the entire lifecycle of the partnerships, all the way from offering design and on-boarding, through to go-live and post-integration.
API Integration Journey
Designing your API Strategy
The best strategy ensures that for each phase of the developers’ integration journey, the experience delivered is distinctive – i.e., for each phase, we need to ensure –
- The ability to innovate, and design the best possible offering
- Minimal wasted time – time spent searching for information, reworking, writing boilerplate code, etc.
- Reduced errors
- Low friction, bottlenecks, issue resolution time
A frictionless, seamless, experience that enables developers to achieve the maximum productivity and creativity requires offerings that simplify and automate processes, and assist the integration squad through their journey and interactions.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution – designing the optimal developer experience strategy requires mapping of your organizational systems, tools, processes and partner interactions to eliminate specific points of friction along the journey. However, it is imperative to keep the following elements of the Developer Experience Portal in mind, while deciding what offerings to make available:
1. Effective, structured developer documentation
2. Dev tools aimed at simplifying and automating the dev process – including SDKs in key languages and platforms, and sandboxes.
3. Partner lifecycle management tools aimed at improving – digitizing and automating the experience across interactions. This includes digital solutions for all partner-related interactions across on-boarding and off-boarding, project management, data sharing, incident management, and metrics, review and monitoring.
4. Helpdesk / Concierge services for assistance, removing bottlenecks and any customizations. This may include a customer service team that is available for assistance to help the integration squad with queries, issues, and customizations.
Developing the optimal strategy for your DX
Developer Experience in the Open Banking context, is the coming together of technology, tools, processes and the partnership operating model, to ensure a productive, organized and seamless working relationship.
To develop the strategy that will most effectively deliver your distinctive DX, keep in mind the following
- Map the Developer Journey: DX spans the entire developer journey, and not only the app development and API integration phase. Your DX strategy should not be limited to the tools that support the API integration, but should aim to deliver automation, self-service, efficiency and a wow-experience through the entire set of interactions.
- Develop a Developer-first mindset: this needs to pervade across design of systems, technology and processes. Examples include adoption of agile and DevOps, frequent feedback loops and interaction across teams, autonomous and accountable team structures, Docs-as-Code approach, and other such methodologies, which play a significant role in improving DX. A developer-first approach also entails reliance on self-service, and hence making the infrastructure to enable self-service possible.
- Invest in DX offerings: technologies make the development process efficient. Companies need to invest in tools that simplify and fast-track the integration experience through the principles of automation and self‑service. Best-in-class DX tools also enable governance, visibility, traceability, and observability throughout the development cycle.
