The highlights section includes a financial profile summing up all the important financial numbers of the report and relevant business information. The customer wanted to utilize GenAI technology to optimize its business report-building process by summarizing the financial profile of every company.

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API or application programming interface is, simply put, the code that allows two different software programs to communicate with each other. It gives access to data or a service functionality in a database or app. This, of course, has far-reaching applications.

Why API-first? Top benefits for your enterprise

APIs can help enable interactions with other apps, smart devices, and human users. And today, companies in the know have begun to leverage APIs to drive digital transformation. For many organizations, it can help support their new platform business models.

An API-first approach has many proven benefits.

Here are two use cases where an API-first approach makes a tangible difference:

An API-first e-commerce platform allows for seamless integration with payment gateways, logistics providers, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. This translates to a smoother user experience, faster checkout process, and efficient order fulfillment.

A financial services app leveraging an API-first approach can easily integrate with stock exchanges, credit bureaus, and other financial institutions. This enables features like real-time stock quotes, credit score checks and personalized investment recommendations.

What does “good API design” look like?

You can future-proof API architecture with good design.

When it comes to API design, thumb rules to follow are to design APIs with scalability and agility in mind. Leverage microservices and API gateways to create modular, loosely coupled APIs, and employ open standards and versioning to ensure compatibility and to future-proof your API investments.

These features translate to some best practices that need to be synonymous with your process.

10 best practices for an API-first development strategy

By following these best practices, you can establish a robust and successful API-first development strategy. The focus on business alignment, technical excellence and continuous improvement will ensure your APIs deliver real value and contribute to the overall success of your software projects.

Business Business Practices

Ensure the design is aligned with business goals: Don’t just build features, build value. Ensure APIs directly contribute to achieving overarching business objectives, whether it’s driving revenue growth, streamlining partner integrations, or fostering a developer ecosystem.

Common goals, a clear path, shared processes – that’s the recipe for successful app development. When there’s a strong team of principals that get both business and tech speaking the same language, that’s where we see the wins. Lucas Eagleton, Technology Principal, Cloud Kinetics

Start stakeholder collaboration early: Get stakeholders in the loop from the start – potential end users, business teams, designers, the dev team, the infrastructure team, and anyone else who may be relevant. You will be able to better define data requirements, access control requirements, as well as API use cases.

Consider business impact (for old and new users) when versioning: While you introduce new features in new API versions, also keep in mind compatibility for current/existing clients on the API.

Technical Best Practices

Follow reusable well-defined design principles: Modular API components will help with seamless integration into different applications and bring down development effort/time. Implement well-defined design principles like RESTful architecture for consistency and ease of adoption. Enforce clear naming conventions, resource structures, and response formats (JSON, XML) for efficient integration.

Build security from the start: Prioritize security throughout the API development lifecycle. Implement strong authentication and authorization mechanisms (OAuth, JWT) to control access and prevent unauthorized usage. Utilize secure communication protocols (HTTPS) and robust data validation to safeguard sensitive information.

Implement continuous testing: Your testing strategy should span the entire development process and include unit testing, integration testing, as well as performance testing. Comprehensive testing helps improve reliability, functionality, as well as scalability of the API.

Developers are your API champions. Invest in a comprehensive developer portal with clear, interactive documentation, code samples, tutorials, and sandboxes for testing. Bring the team in early if you can. If not, a large amount of rework/rewriting of components/V2 of newly released products will need to be done because it doesn’t fit the requirements that got considered too late. Ideally, if you want to combine disparate solutions, build them in at the start with a bigger picture view.

Create style guides: Be sure to create and circulate an API style guide at a company level to bring consistency across APIs. This should cover data formats, conventions, security best practices, and error-handling approaches.

“By helping design the API first, we have pieces that flow out so that everyone has a central documentation to refer to. Sure, there might be some reworking and changes, but this enables parallel teams to work on it in tandem,” says Lucas Eagleton, Technology Principal, Cloud Kinetics

Monitor API usage: Monitoring API usage patterns can help you spot areas for improvement and keep it relevant vis-a-vis customer needs.

Use automation: Automation tools can greatly streamline workflows and help cut the time and manual effort involved in API documentation generation, testing, and deployment.

Test, Test, test the API: Do remember to test the API at various stages to see how tweaks or changes or additional features are impacting overall functionality as well as security. Collaboration is key so get all stakeholders looped in early on. And then test, test, test! Keep this up throughout the development lifecycle.

API testing tools help cover a range of scenarios and test it on all the key features/areas earlier in the life cycle, a trend called “shifting left”. This helps spot issues as soon as they come in and allows teams to fix them right away. Punit Chheda, Vice President – Enterprise Architecture & Consulting, Cloud Kinetics

In an API-first approach, this is mission critical because an API that is not performing, has availability issues or errors can result in customer churn and have a negative impact on your business. The goal is to catch issues well in time so that they do not flow into production and eventually impact users. By executing API tests within CI/CD pipelines, teams can manage more rapid iterations, frequent releases, and simultaneously also lower the risk of bugs. Overall, this helps lower the risk of eroding customer trust and protects the brand image

API in action: A Cloud Kinetics case study

Here’s an instance of how we streamlined global operations for a food manufacturer with Mulesoft API deployment. A leading global food and confectionery company faced challenges integrating their complex supply chain, logistics and manufacturing systems spread across various locations. Streamlining these integrations was crucial for optimizing operations and ensuring efficient data flow.

Challenges for the enterprise included:

• Global system disparity: The company’s supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing systems operated independently across different regions, hindering data visibility and process automation.
• Integration complexity: Integrating these disparate systems required a robust and scalable solution to manage the complexity of data exchange.

The company partnered with Cloud Kinetics to implement an API-led integration strategy using Mulesoft CloudHub, a hybrid integration platform. Here’s how Cloud Kinetics addressed the challenges:

• Mulesoft CloudHub implementation: Cloud Kinetics chose Mulesoft CloudHub as the central platform for API deployment due to its scalability, flexibility, and pre-built connectors for various enterprise applications.
• API design, development, and deployment: The team designed, developed, and deployed foundational APIs that could seamlessly connect the disparate supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing systems.
• Standardized integration patterns: Established standardized integration patterns to ensure consistency, reusability, and maintainability of the APIs across the entire ecosystem.
• Expert support: The team provided ongoing support throughout the development lifecycle, including troubleshooting any integration or workflow issues, and reviewing API design, code, and security posture.

Outcomes that stood out for the client:

• Streamlined operations: The successful API deployment enabled seamless data exchange between previously siloed systems, significantly streamlining global supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing operations.
• Reusable APIs: The creation of foundational APIs provided a reusable foundation for future integrations, saving development time and resources.
• Standardized integrations: Standardized integration patterns ensured consistency and maintainability of the API landscape, simplifying future modifications and enhancements.

Mulesoft and a well-defined API strategy can empower businesses to overcome complex integration challenges and achieve operational efficiency across a global footprint.

At Cloud Kinetics, we’ve seen first hand how an API-driven approach can help our customers drive growth through new business models. It translates to faster collaboration and enables enterprises to quickly on-board new product offerings and enhance customer experience. Harsha Bhat, Senior Director – Applications, Cloud Kinetics

Prioritize API design and design your API with reusability in mind. Remember, the API world is constantly changing. Be prepared to iterate on your API design based on usage and feedback. This is an investment that pays off in terms of faster development, increased agility, and a more robust and scalable software ecosystem – one that has far-reaching business impact.

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Hardware matters. Whether businesses are building custom applications, migrating to the cloud, or deploying new services at the edge, Intel’s next-generation instances powered by the latest 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors (Saphire Rapids) enable businesses today to optimize even the most demanding workloads and applications while reducing costs.

“As an industry-leading innovator, Intel has long been our steadfast partner in providing enterprise- grade computing capabilities for our customers to achieve the agility and efficiency they need to scale their cloud architecture. We look forward to advancing our collaboration with Intel to help businesses transition from a state of cloud-first to cloud-smart and take advantage of Intel’s cutting-edge technologies such as the 4th Gen Intel®Xeon® Scalable Processors across emerging domains spanning GenAI and Modernization.”Ayush Keshan
President - Application Services, Cloud Kinetics

With Intel’s solutions, Cloud Kinetics have helped industries across Financial Services, Manufacturing, and Transport & Logistics to run critical business applications and achieve faster time to market.

"Our collaboration blends technical expertise and ecosystem innovation to drive digital transformation and empower businesses in today's evolving digital landscape. Cloud Kinetics adeptly harnesses Intel's AI and Cloud technologies across optimized infrastructure and software tools to accelerate outcomes. Together with Cloud Kinetics, Intel is dedicated to delivering top-notch solutions that open up new opportunities and pave way for customer success in the ever-evolving cloud era."Elaine Chan
Director - Ecosystem & Software Sales APAC & Japan at Intel

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As the company’s customer base rapidly grew and user demand spiked prior to events, it urgently needed a scalable, dynamic and adaptable infrastructure that could handle peak loads.

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As part of their optimization journey, Sieu Viet wanted to review their cloud infrastructure on AWS to take stock of existing capabilities and to identify next steps aligned with their business goals. In addition, a planned CRM system change was lined up as the company headed into its next phase of growth.

“Our partnership with Cloud Kinetics has been invaluable as we navigate our cloud journey and scale our digital infrastructure. Their expertise and focus on continuous optimization perfectly complement our business goals, making them a trusted partner in our transformation strategy.” Dat Vo, Head of Tech, Sieu Viet

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For traditional banks this doubles up as an opportunity and an urgent reminder. To compete effectively with digital banks and fintechs and thrive in this evolving financial ecosystem, senior IT/business decision-makers at established banks must prioritize modernizing legacy systems and embracing the Open Banking paradigm.

Advancing customer experience with open banking

Open banking ushers in a new era of convenience and financial control. It fosters financial inclusion, more personalized services and convenience for customers. Open banking also increases the competitiveness of banks by enabling them to provide a diverse suite of financial products & services at reduced operational costs.

Some open banking use cases include:

• Instant payments and fund transfers directly from third-party applications such as PayNow in Singapore and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in India.
• Account aggregation features for customers to access and manage savings & deposit accounts, loans, credit cards and investments from a single application.

From monolith to microservices: The application modernization journey to open banking

For most banks, successful adoption of open-banking standards will mean substantial re-architecting of their current application estate and IT infrastructure, and accelerated integration with third parties to on-board new products & services from partners. This is a critical success factor in the open banking ecosystem.

To seamlessly integrate with various third parties through APIs, banks will require an enterprise-wide adoption of microservices and API-based architecture to consume data from core banking and other legacy backend systems. This will support agile delivery, provide scalability and flexibility with multi-cloud / hybrid cloud deployments.

A microservices-based application modernization approach will eventually enable banks to drive growth through new business models, collaborate with partners to quickly on-board new product offerings and enhance customer experience.

1. Building the optimal microservices-based architecture for open banking

The application modernization journey and timelines will depend on the product roadmap, technology readiness and current IT architecture of the bank.

Banks with monolithic applications, legacy core banking systems and legacy integration platforms will need to adopt a phased approach to minimize business risks and potential disruptions. A phased approach will also allow banks to on-board partners and build marketplace offerings like digital wallets, lending and insurance services for customers in an incremental manner.

The figure here below illustrates an indicative microservices-based reference architecture for a bank along with key components such as API gateway, service orchestrator and microservices-based core services.

• The first step in the application modernization journey would involve building a service orchestration layer (Figure 1, point# 2) to efficiently manage commonly used cross-cutting concerns and non-functional requirements such as security, configurations, log aggregation, distributed tracing, service discovery and circuit breaker.
• All the above services can be developed as common components designed to ensure the core business logic is separated from cross-cutting non-functional concerns.
• The service orchestration layer along with an API gateway will interface with the core banking platform and expose APIs to both internal and external parties for accelerated integration.
• In subsequent phases, banks can start decomposing their monolithic core applications using various Microservices design patterns such as Strangler and Sidecar aligned to product domains such as account services, payment services and underwriting services (Figure 1: point# 3). For example, account services would include features such as account opening, customer onboarding and account updates.

2. Microservices-based application modernization: Challenges & way forward

Transitioning from a monolith to microservices can be a complex but rewarding undertaking for banks. Often, banks are concerned about technical complexity, security challenges and change management.

The right application enablement partner will equip you with a comprehensive roadmap, from initial strategy and architecture design to seamless implementation and ongoing support, ensuring your microservices journey is smooth and efficient.

3. Modernizing banking applications with Cloud Kinetics

Cloud Kinetics helps banking & financial services customers to amplify the value of cloud with our Application Modernization approach, driving business agility & flexibility.

Our modernization competencies focus on Application Portfolio Assessment, Microservices Architecture, Serverless, API Integration, Security & Compliance combined with DevOps & Continuous Delivery Approach. Our strategic partnerships with industry leaders like AWS, Azure, GCP (hyperscalers), Kong (API gateway), CAST (portfolio assessment) enable us to deliver a seamless solution for our customers.

Customer impact story: App modernization, cloud-native design & a one-stop digital marketplace for a leading fintech

Our customer is a leading fintech company that facilitates financing through credit guarantee schemes for micro, small & medium enterprises (MSMEs). They felt their current platform was lacking the comprehensiveness, accessibility and user-friendly experience that MSMEs now demand in a digital-first world.

With Cloud Kinetics, the customer embarked on a transformation journey to modernize their platform and provide MSMEs with a one-stop digital marketplace, with opportunities for cross- and up-selling products and services.

Cloud Kinetics developed the digital lending platform on AWS, using microservices architecture to create a cloud-native lending platform that was secure, scalable and adaptable to evolving needs. Cloud Kinetics also built a digital marketplace for the customer that expanded beyond loans, offering MSMEs financial products like working capital solutions, insurance options, and seamless integration with credit guarantee schemes. The interface enabled the bank to offer MSMEs a more intuitive experience and better manage their financial health.

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Key Highlights Include:

👉🏻Proactive Planning: Strategic approaches for long-term project success.

👉🏻Stakeholder Engagement: Effective methods to align development goals with business objectives.

👉🏻API Design Excellence: Uncover the power of an API-first approach – enhancing flexibility, accelerating innovation, and ensuring scalability.

👉🏻The Power of Documentation: How clear documentation minimizes project risks and enhances team productivity.

To view the full recording click here:

Our Webinar Panelists:

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