How to Launch Your FinTech App for Maximum User Engagement
Also, learn how to develop your app faster to save precious time for the launch phase and plan it using app store optimization best practices.
APIs are everything in the Fintech world. To reign in the data-driven age, you need to gather and process tons of information, and APIs claw and drag it relentlessly. Unseen, they are the core power underneath the lion's share of Fintech processes: “open” in “open banking” stands for “open APIs.”
Explore with me the intricacies of developing, optimizing, and integrating APIs. I'll guide you through the most popular API protocols, ways to optimize API development and integration, and steps to best secure APIs.
First things first. Let’s take a look at the most actively used protocols for building APIs and see when to use each.
REST is perhaps the most popular architecture.
The first API architecture ever, Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a simple means to send multiple parameters and receive the desired result.
While SOAP is not as popular today as REST and RPC, it’s a sure match if your primary concerns are standardization and security.
Released by Google in 2016, this protocol has already gained its share of popularity as the evolved design of RPC.
Two approaches can help you with that. Both are centered around an API contract — the documentation that explains your API to its consumers. Based on that, there are two approaches — code-first and contract-first.
With this approach, first comes the discussion — how the API will look like, what endpoints it will have, and what data you receive upon this or that request. Thus you form a contract, and after that, the back-end team and the client’s team start the development simultaneously.
Pros
Thus this approach fits best large enterprises that might want to launch another product and have all the time they need.
Basically, it’s the “just do it” approach.
You have a front-end team, a back-end team, and an application. The teams work separately on a web application, an Android client, and an iOS client. First, your back-end team codes all the functionality and then passes it to the front-end team to create a fully-fledged API. In this case, before the development, no one knows how the finalized API will look eventually.
Pros
A warning here: with the contract-first approach, you might have a gap between the contract and the realization if the team lacks ideas or if something else goes wrong during the discussion.
Develop beyond conventional with a team of Fintech experts.
Whether you have API as a product or API as the part of your application, they both provide access to sensitive data or network resources, so you have to protect them.
Below, I list eight tips for completing that multi-step security quest.
OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and JSON web tokens can help you authenticate API traffic and control access to API resources.
If you have third parties tapping your internal data and systems through APIs, you should control who can access what and when. Also, your teams need to check every change to the data, be it adding new data, deleting, or editing some.
APIs often exchange sensitive data via requests and responses, so using HTTPS to protect it is a must. It’s better to go for HTTP Strict Transport Security to avoid unexpected behavior of API clients.
Cleaning and validating data on your company’s side should be obligatory — better to be safe with zero trust than sorry with standard injection flaws and cross-site request forgery attacks. Debugging tools can help you streamline the process.
Ensure that API filters the information and the responses include only relevant parts.
To ensure APIs are functioning and behaving as they should, you’ll need your security teams to check their security controls regularly. If there’s evidence of an API threat, your incident response teams must be ready with a clear action plan to address the issue.
When possible, keep the keys out of the API code or app’s source tree files, place them in environment variables or secret management tools, periodically change the keys and delete the ones you no longer need.
AI can help identify suspicious behavior patterns by providing insights into how users interact with APIs.
Not sure what's the best way for your business to go about APIs?
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By following the tips I included above, you can develop a business tool that enables secure and powerful data exchange for you and your clients. But what matters most is who will create, optimize, and integrate this tool.
A team responsible for such a critical part of your Fintech offering should act as one and have a strong background in the industry. I am lucky to be part of such a team that supports many successful projects.
Schedule a quick call for a free consultation and see how we can help your business grow.
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