Financial institutions around the world have been increasingly focusing on open APIs and data usage, seeing great potential in these new business areas. This report examines the most promising technologies and ecosystem creations related to open APIs and data usage. This is the sixth installment in the digital transformation series, which report on possibilities related to legacy and ecosystem migration, innovation, and emerging technologies in the Japanese financial and banking industry.
In 2002, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos issued what has since come to be called the "Amazon Mandate." The document was sent to all Amazon employees and required they proactively use APIs, mandating the following:
''All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions."
Fifteen years after this declaration, the tsunami of open APIs has spread to the most conservative financial services industry. In May 2017, the Japanese financial services industry was ushered into a new framework. The "Banking Law Amendment Act" introduced a registration system for Third Party Providers (TPPs). At the same time, however, the new regulation emerged with the publication of the Bank's policy of collaboration and cooperation with TPPs, and with measures to promote open innovation in banks. This was a major turning point that overturned Japanese financial regulations by 180 degrees.
Celent proposes a strategic evolution it has dubbed Open API 2.0 to fully benefit from the advent of the open API era, which will be emerging in earnest in 2020. At the core of this strategy is data monetization technology (data-driven business innovation achieved through improvement to the data usage environment coupled with modernization related to system connections).
