Why embedded service providers need a universal API adaptor in 2024
At mmob we talk about providing a universal adaptor for APIs, but what is this and why is it necessary?
We have already discussed some of the challenges for API-first companies to reach their full potential, but let’s delve into the actual integration itself.
A service provider wants to embed their product into a partner’s distribution channel, so that it can be offered to end users. They offer their API to the partner and hey presto – one product is “plugged into” another. How hard can it be?
The developer experience
The idea of integrating an API to power a financial application often seems simple, until that is a developer team gets their hands on the documentation. APIs can be notoriously tricky to implement even for experienced developers, whether due to legacy standards, unspecific documentation or complex authentication flows.
While certain standards are in place to try to improve accessibility and the overall developer experience, they are not often fully implemented or are implemented in a hybrid fashion out of necessity due to technology stack, architectural or data concerns. As a result, when building integrations developers often spend a significant amount of time in configuration troubleshooting, not to mention the ongoing maintenance that various APIs might require.
The barriers to adoption that a Universal API Adaptor can solve
For Product and Service Providers who serve their proposition through an API, the Universal Adaptor solves for a number of key issues:
Maintaining separate integrations
Traditionally, if a Service Provider wants to deploy into 8 partners, this means maintaining 8 separate integrations. This means a high workload to ensure configuration changes, compatibility and standards are maintained throughout the product lifecycle.
Inconsistent UX customisation
The meaning of ‘white label’ often varies wildly, but customisation for Partners is often limited to the addition of a logo and a few minor UI tweaks. As standard, but especially in a high-trust environment such as regulated financial services, a variety of branding options including co-branding are required, and often there is a lot of back and forth and custom work for each Distribution Partner’s needs.
Time for technical deployment
Given the complexities above and those we’ve mentioned before, time for technical deployment is inevitably longer than expected and can often be disrupted by other commitments in the Partner’s Product Roadmap, like updating existing features and generally ‘keeping the lights on’.
Doing it all again
Once all of this work has been done, the Service Provider then decides to deploy its product into another channel - and for some inexplicable reason, this work starts from scratch all over again…
Our Universal API Adaptor
Over the past four years, we have worked to understand these API integration pain points across numerous fintech and financial services companies. The result? We’ve built a Universal API Adaptor that solves problems for Product and Service Providers, resulting in an offering that can be deployed by their Partners into their native channels within just hours.
A Universal Adaptor is essentially an integration platform that helps to unify and standardise APIs in order to distribute them. It is built to address the common challenges with APIs which are set out above, in addition to removing a number of roadblocks to getting an API product to market in any channel. Here are a few things we love about it:
Manage multiple integrations: With a Universal Adaptor, the integration and any lifecycle changes only need to be made once, tested, and then are federated out to all partners simultaneously, all without those partners needing to lift a finger.
Rapid, Sophisticated Customisation: Our technology allows a rich UI to be built around the API rapidly, with its low-code capabilities meaning an API-led, natively embedded application can be deployed - bolstering trust and engagement among users on the platform.
Technical Deployment in Hours: given the complexities outlined above and their tendency towards significant time-to-market, a Universal Adaptor is far better placed to handle the technical integration. Leveraging the our SDK, a developer can implement an Embedded Application in a Partner’s interface in just a couple of hours (our record is 20 minutes!).
Curious to learn more about our Universal API Adaptor and how it could solve challenges for your integrations? Get in touch.
