Tag Archives: API

Finance and Banking, News

TBC Bank decreases time to market for new offerings by 40% while reducing integration costs by one-third with Kong

Kong’s API platform streamlines innovation processes to enhance competitive advantage at banking group

02 August 2022, London – TBC Bank, a leading financial institution in the Caucasus and Central Asia Region, has reduced time to market for new and enhanced products and services by 40% since implementing Kong Enterprise, the cloud native API platform. By removing the need for a centralised integration layer and scaling back the associated resources, Kong’s technology has not only streamlined innovation processes at the bank but reduced costs by one-third.

Founded in 1992, TBC Bank is one of 40 financial institutions listed on the London Stock Exchange with 30% of its investors based in the UK. Over time, TBC’s IT infrastructure and processes were starting to become increasingly complex and inefficient. All requests for new or updated services and products – no matter how big or small – had to be submitted to TBC’s central integrations team, who would process each individual request.

With thousands of pieces of software and processes in use across the bank, bottlenecks had a direct impact on the business, as innovative product launches and enhanced service offerings would be delayed. Recognising that a modern era of software development had emerged which could eliminate these pain points, TBC embarked on a digital transformation journey. After an extensive evaluation, the bank selected Kong Enterprise based on Kong’s technical capabilities, the platform’s ease of use, and level of expert support available.

Kong’s cloud native API platform enables organizations to meet customer demands quickly and bring solutions to market faster with API and service connectivity that scales easily and securely. Built for the cloud with microservices in mind, it eliminates the complexity of any mix of old and new technologies to allow developers to work with APIs across architectures – so they can build faster, better and more securely.

Within just three months of implementing Kong, TBC had configured and launched a fully operational loan API-based product. Loan API provides the bank’s mobile and internet banking business customers with access to and control over their loans. Serving 700,000 customer requests per day, with 24/7 availability, the API has become one of the bank’s most important channels with its customers.

TBC Bank CTO, Bidzina Matsaberidze says, “Our previous system was too complex to use for all the team members. In contrast, Kong is much easier to use, allowing teams to proceed with their innovation plans without having to rely on a centralised integration process. By providing our developer teams with this freedom, Kong is accelerating our innovation cycles, increasing productivity and seamlessly bridging legacy systems with modern applications. Our teams can now manage their own API requirements within their desired timeframes, ensuring that customers have the best possible experience and enhancing the bank’s competitive position in the industry.”

“The financial services industry is moving at such a pace that banks need to be able to adapt quickly if they are to stay one step ahead of the competition,” adds Carl Mattsson, vice president of EMEA, Kong. “By removing the need for centralised integration, TBC has become more agile and better placed to launch new and upgraded offerings to meet ever-changing customer requirements.”

News

WSO2 Wins Long Term Contract with Premier British Household Brand Central England Co-operative

WSO2 will deliver API management and enterprise integration solutions to Central England Co-operative in 2022 to assist the co-operative in developing IT infrastructure that supports its growing community of members and consumers

London – 21st April 2022 – WSO2, the leader in digital transformation technology, today announced that it has won a significant new customer, Central England Co-operative (CEC). WSO2 will deliver its world-class API management and enterprise integration solutions to CEC, helping the organisation put in place the technology infrastructure to better support its growing community of members and consumers.

Central England Co-operative is the second-largest regional consumer co-operative in the UK out of 16 consumer co-operatives. Formed by the merger of Midlands and Anglia Co-operatives, CEC has more than 400 trading outlets, a family of over 8,000 colleagues, and more than 250,000 regular trading members. While the organisation is independent from the co-operative group, it is part of the wider co-operative movement, working together to provide benefits to its members and customers. CEC trades across 20 counties from the Midlands to the East Coast—through more than 250 food stores, 100-plus funeral homes, filling stations, and florists

CEC is partnering with WSO2 to meet its evolving API management, system integration and access management needs in both on-premises and cloud-based deployments. The project, which is due to kick off in the first half of 2022, will enable CEC to sync databases between different locations and create much-needed insights, files, and reports. CEC selected WSO2, which now serves more than 800 customers in over 80 countries, based on its advanced technical capabilities and solutions for securely delivering APIs, applications, and digital services.

“As multi-market retailers, like CEC, look to embrace digital business models, we are seeing growing demand for our unique approach to coupling best-in-class API management and integration,” said Ricardo Diniz, vice president and general manager, United Kingdom, Spain and France, WSO2. “We are honored to work with CEC in significantly lowering the required skills, time, and cost barriers to delivering secure new digital services to the co-operative’s customers and members.”

“Our goal is to always meet and exceed our members’ needs and stand up for the things they believe in, and our collaboration with WSO2 will enable us to deliver better services to our members,” said Adam Testro, Software Engineering Manager, CEC. “We were impressed by WSO2’s solutions and approach and its role in delivering API management, integration and integration to a global blue-chip customer base, and we are excited to work with the WSO2 team in 2022 and beyond.”

News

WSO2 Announces General Availability of Choreo Digital Platform as a Service

Choreo GA release helps teams take digital apps from ideation to production in days; adds side-by-side VS Code and graphical code editing, CIAM, marketplace, deep GitHub integration, and more

London, UK – 30th March 2022 – More than ever, the ability to quickly innovate new digital products and services is critical to enterprise strategies for market differentiation, growth, and profitability. However, these initiatives are often stalled by the complexity of building a digital platform and a shortage of developers with the right expertise. Today, WSO2 is bringing down these barriers to innovation with the general availability (GA) of Choreo, a digital platform as a service (digital PaaS).

Choreo empowers organisations to rapidly deliver new digital experiences by creating and deploying services, integrations, and APIs in hours or days versus the weeks or months that most projects take today. The all-inclusive platform abstracts away the complexity of cloud native infrastructure so that development teams can, for the first time, quickly create, compose, collaborate on, reuse, and deliver API-driven business logic. Key benefits include:

Increased developer productivity. As the first commercial solution built on the Ballerina cloud native, open-source programming language and runtime, Choreo is the only platform that enables developers of varying skill levels to create apps using a graphical view of the code, a textual view of the code, or both simultaneously with full round-trip synchronisation. Developers can focus on building only the core logic they need in a simplified environment with artificial intelligence (AI) assisted development to achieve greater productivity and much faster time to market.

Simplified DevOps and deployment. Choreo, which runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, replaces custom tooling and scripting with built-in multi-stage, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and deep observability for automatically building, testing, and deploying applications on Kubernetes. This enables teams to focus on creating production-ready applications instead of managing the underlying infrastructure.

Security and governance by default. With Choreo, services, integrations, and APIs are secured and governed by default. The platform features an open standards-based API gateway with security and rate limiting, strong authentication and authorisation, and encryption for all messages. Choreo also provides built-in, flexible governance that helps to automate API lifecycle management.

“The ability to quickly deliver new digital products and services is separating the market leaders from the followers in almost every industry,” said Eric Newcomer, WSO2 chief technology officer. “The Choreo digital platform as a service democratises the necessary capabilities for building cloud native apps and services. Now developers can immediately collaborate on creating, deploying, securing, and monetising APIs, integrations and services that deliver business value and great customer experiences.”

“A modern digital PaaS should blur the lines between app dev, integration, and security, and democratise participation in delivering digital experiences without excessive technical overhead. WSO2’s Choreo offers a platform for both developers and business experts to get their arms around the complexity of building and deploying API-driven cloud native applications,” said Jason English, principal analyst, Intellyx.

What’s New in the Choreo GA Release

The beta version of Choreo was first introduced in June 2021, and it has been used by nearly 10,000 developers worldwide. The Choreo GA release, available today, features significant new capabilities that have been added since Choreo’s debut.

Integration with Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) enables developers to use the widely adopted VS Code source-code editor within a web browser while working within Choreo for a seamless, side-by-side pro-code and graphical low-code editing experience.

A new Choreo marketplace lets developers easily discover and reuse integrations, services, or other APIs; publish their own work as APIs with a few clicks; and share and collaborate with both internal and external developers. The marketplace also includes hundreds of pre-built connectors to commonly used systems to help developers get a jumpstart on various integrations.

Enhanced GitHub integration facilitates collaborative code development, revisions, commits, etc., since any code created in Choreo is now stored in a private GitHub repository exclusive for each component. Development teams also can bring and work in their own GitHub repository while getting the full Choreo benefits. Enterprises can then take the lock-in free code that is stored in GitHub and run it wherever they want.

Secured by the Asgardeo IDaaS from WSO2, Choreo expands upon its integrated identity and access management (IAM), security, and governance capabilities and now enables companies to also offer secure, intuitive and personalised digital experiences via customer IAM (CIAM).

New projects and group components functionality in Choreo let developers organise their components into projects for easier maintenance. One or more of these components can then be grouped into a project in Choreo, which is highly useful when there are multiple projects.

“Delivering cloud native applications is a challenging, time-consuming process,” said Kanchana Wickremasinghe, vice president and general manager of the WSO2 Integration Business Unit. “Our Choreo digital PaaS hides that complexity, so developers, DevOps teams, and site reliability engineers can team to efficiently build, deploy, observe, secure and manage the applications, APIs and integrations driving their digital innovation.”

News

85 percent of UK consumers do not trust businesses with the privacy and security of their online data, but 50% prepared to overlook these concerns in favour of a better user experience

A recent study of 1,012 UK consumers, conducted independently by API management provider Axway, has revealed that the majority of Britons have serious concerns over how their data is stored and secured, however 50% are prepared to overlook those concerns in favour of a better user experience.

The study showed 85 percent of respondents are concerned about the privacy and security of their online data, with almost 75 percent agreeing that companies do not make it sufficiently transparent as to how they handle their data. Mistrust could potentially lead to detrimental effects for any organisation with an online presence: for 53 percent, a data security incident would be a reason to end the customer relationship for good. When asked more specifically, 49.4 percent replied that they would at the very least stop dealing with a company until the problem was solved or they could change their login details (30.8 percent). However, with 50% prepared to overlook those concerns in favour of a better user experience, organisations have an opportunity to build seamless digital experiences and form a foundation of trust.

The study also found that almost 70 percent of Britons would choose to work with businesses that offered a more secure approach to protect personal data. However, for almost 10%, engaging with a business still depends on how much trust they have in the company, irrespective of its approach to data protection. At the same time, just 22 percent trust “Big Tech” more with their data compared to smaller, independent or local companies, while 61.9 percent trust the large and smaller companies about the same.

VP and Chief Catalyst at Axway, Brian Pagano says: “Whether in energy, health, finance, or retail, companies are trying to stand out and provide brilliant digital experiences while also complying to industry data privacy and security requirements, which is no simple proposition. Eliminating friction in customer experiences is the biggest competitive advantage, and these survey results point to security breaches and privacy concerns as a snag in the fabric of the seamless experience people have come to expect”.

“Experience tells us consumers will go wherever the least amount of friction is, regardless of the custody chain of your data. If people feel unsure about how their data is being handled, companies have an opportunity to build trust so that their average consumer doesn’t need to concern themselves with these details. Enterprises can rely on a suite of tools, like Axway’s Amplify API Management Platform, which will give them scalability, privacy and security audit trails, and regulatory and compliance frameworks so they can focus on delivering the best and most secure experience.”

IT Services, News

Ballerina Language Swan Lake GA Release Boosts Productivity by Radically Simplifying How Developers Build and Deploy Cloud-Native Applications

The latest release of Ballerina open-source language extends unique ability to simultaneously code using text and graphical views to Visual Studio; delivers capabilities for helping developers rapidly build, integrate, and deploy services and APIs in the cloud

London, UK – 9th February 2022 – Enterprises are moving to cloud-native applications to accelerate their innovation and scale their digital services. Yet too often programming languages that were never designed for the cloud cause unnecessary complexity and delays. Now with general availability (GA) of the Swan Lake release of Ballerina—announced today—organisations have an enterprise-grade, open-source language that radically simplifies how developers build, integrate, and deploy cloud-native applications.

Ballerina is a 100% open-source project created and sponsored by WSO2, with all parts of the project developed openly at https://github.com/ballerina-platform. Already downloaded by nearly 10,000 developers worldwide, Ballerina is the only modern cloud-native programming language that provides features for easily using, combining and creating network services for the cloud.

Uniquely, Ballerina provides a bidirectional mapping of sequence diagrams and code, meaning the diagram is the code, and the code is the diagram. As a result, developers can easily switch between working in a pro-code or low-code view of a program as needed to maximise their productivity. At the same time, Ballerina removes much of the complexity in developing enterprise-grade cloud-native applications, APIs and microservices by providing a first-class way to represent network interactions while streamlining many functions around data usage, configurations, cloud deployments, and more.

“The move to cloud-native applications—which are inherently integrations of services, data, transactions and processes—has rendered many older programming languages obsolete,” said Dr Sanjiva Weerawarana, founder of the Ballerina project and founder and CEO of WSO2. “With our Ballerina Swan Lake release now in GA, development teams for the first time have a modern programming language that simplifies cloud-native app development and integration, facilitates collaboration, and enables developers to rapidly innovate new digital products and services.”

“Ballerina provides an integration-centric approach to building cloud-native applications that leverages an HTTP-centric programming model,” said Jason Bloomberg, president of industry analyst firm Intellyx. “As a result, Ballerina shifts integration complexity away from protocol-centric challenges to the broader architectural considerations that drive the creation of high-quality, scalable cloud-native applications.”

Maximising Developer Productivity

The Swan Lake release extends the benefits of Ballerina to the global Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) developer community with the significantly expanded functionality of its Ballerina VSCode plugin. Now developers can use the widely adopted VS Code source-code editor while taking advantage of Ballerina to simultaneously edit programs both graphically and textually. The Ballerina VSCode plugin also features intelligent code completion for the Ballerina language via the Ballerina Editor, syntax highlighting and debugging.

The plugin complements Ballerina’s intuitive syntax for developing APIs and different types of services, including RESTful, GraphQL, WebSocket and gRPC services. Also included are seamless support for JSON, XML and ProtoBuf; powerful constructs for working with data; and automatic concurrency control to support enterprise-grade applications. Configuration management is an inherent feature of the language allowing DevOps teams to securely inject environment-specific configurations into Ballerina programs. Additionally, Ballerina observability enables developers to understand the execution and performance impact introduced by the Ballerina program. Collectively, Ballerina’s capabilities enable development teams to create and integrate resilient, secure, high-performance APIs and microservices that are easy to maintain and iterate on.

Ballerina also comes with deployment abstraction capabilities and supports the generation of Docker and Kubernetes artefacts from code without additional configuration. This simplifies the experience of developing and deploying Ballerina code in the cloud. Code-to-cloud features build the containers and required artefacts by deriving the required values from the Ballerina code to deploy an enterprise’s code into different cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

“I am very impressed with Ballerina’s ideas. I would call this language, ‘Java for modern, agile microservices’,” said Kirill Keker, a solution architect in the Core Team at MVideo. “Thank you for that!”

Full Development Platform

The Ballerina platform provides comprehensive support for modern software engineering processes and toolchains, including:

  • A framework for package/module management, including dependency and version control, which produces repeatable builds from the same source code
  • Ballerina Central, a public web service for sharing modules among developers
  • A framework for documentation and testing of Ballerina programs
  • Built-in tooling for OpenAPI (Swagger), gRPC and AsyncAPI
  • An update tool for keeping Ballerina installations up to date with the latest releases
  • An interactive command-line shell for rapidly learning and prototyping Ballerina code
  • A comprehensive standard library with support for many network protocols, data sources, and data formats to ease Ballerina language adoption

Availability and Support

Ballerina Swan Lake version 2201.0.0 is generally available today. As a fully open-source implementation released under the Apache License 2.0, it does not carry any licensing fees and can be freely downloaded at https://ballerina.io/downloads. Users can find support through its growing open-source community on Ballerina’s Slack Channel, Google Group, or GitHub. Additionally, resources, such as the Quick Tour and Ballerina by Examples, can be found at https://ballerina.io/learn/by-example.

Sponsored and developed by WSO2

WSO2—which enables thousands of enterprises to drive their digital transformation journeys—has invested in Ballerina to address significant shortcomings in how middleware supports the cloud-native world. WSO2’s founder, Dr Sanjiva Weerawarana, created the project in August 2016 and led its technical design in collaboration with James Clark, bringing in their decades of software development and enterprise integration experience. WSO2’s engineering effort for Ballerina has included more than 300 person-years of investment in its nearly six years of development.

 

News, Travel

Duffel and Stripe enable seamless flight payments processing through a powerful API

New payments platform overcomes one of the travel industry’s biggest barriers to entry, allowing businesses to sell flights more easily with no upfront capital

LONDON, 8TH FEBRUARY – Duffel, a leading flights API provider, has today announced the launch of its new payments solution, Duffel Payments. Travel businesses can easily take customer payments online by integrating with Duffel’s API, which puts them in control of the payments process and enables them to make money from selling flights. The platform has been built exclusively for the travel industry in partnership with Stripe – one of the leading payment service providers (PSP) – to underpin the platform’s security and reliability.

New travel businesses can start selling flights with Duffel Payments in a matter of minutes with no upfront capital or down payments. This combats the lengthy applications, approval processes and large bond that are usually necessary when using a PSP. Travel sellers no longer need the regular top-ups and holding of capital in a digital wallet either.

As well as being able to charge their customers directly, Duffel Payments allows travel sellers to add a mark-up to their fares and bundle other travel products together such as accommodation and travel insurance.

To improve the experience for both travel businesses and their customers, Duffel Payments handles refunds fast and without a fuss. This means merchants do not need to navigate complex rules and fees from airlines. Duffel returns funds to merchants and handles everything else behind the scenes.

“Securing a payments provider in the travel industry is notoriously difficult,” said Steve Domin, CEO and co-founder of Duffel. “Other payments solutions require new businesses to have large amounts of money upfront before they even receive payment from customers. These solutions can also make it challenging to bundle up other products, refunds can take a while, and the payment process itself can be temperamental. We’re delighted to partner with Stripe to offer Duffel Payments, which overcomes these pain points.”

“Companies like Duffel are opening up the travel industry to new players by breaking down many of the barriers that prevent companies from getting started and succeeding,” said Mark Barry, Head of EMEA Startups at Stripe. “We’re excited they are using Stripe’s financial infrastructure to abstract complexity and create new possibilities.”

Duffel has ensured that its payments solution is developer-friendly, knowing that merchants want to get started with selling flights quickly, and customers want an easy-to-use platform. Developers can embed the booking form into a website or app in just a few minutes.

Duffel Payments is available in more than 30 countries and customers can use it straight away for booking flights in more than 135 currencies with a variety of payment methods.

Customer testimonials:

“Being able to use Duffel as both our flights and our payments provider is incredibly attractive to Pelikin,” said Sam Brown, CEO of Pelikin. “We’re in the business of making travel and spending simple for our customers. With one integration, we can access powerful APIs through Duffel allowing us to sell flights and extras from major airlines around the world and charge our customers.”

“Altruista is thrilled to be able to easily integrate Duffel Payments,” Will Lopez, Founder of Altruista Travel. “Not having to research, vet and integrate a separate payments provider has made our process infinitely easier. We were able to start integrating and begin testing taking customer payments in a matter of days.”

News

Visa partners with Detected to tackle KYB compliance

Detected, the critical infrastructure component for next-generation KYB compliance, today announced that it has joined Visa Fintech Partner Connect Program in their Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa Region.

Through a new collaboration with Visa, companies will be able to use Detected’s Connected Compliance API to search and locate business credit, corporate and director information from around the globe in seconds. From there, ID verification, UBO information and company documentation can all be gathered and linked to the business’ profile.

Detected fills this critical KYB gap in the payments technology stack with its ‘Find Company’ algorithm – the ability to find any registered company globally with minimal information – API-first technology for seamless deployment, and advanced capabilities to ease customer onboarding.

Liam Chennells, CEO at Detected, said: “Where money moves, compliance is a problem – especially when trying to validate the credentials of a business. If a company, anywhere on earth, is registered with its local authority or government, Detected can find it with less data input than any other solution. We are excited to be working with Visa and its partners to pioneer this category.”

“Businesses want a simpler experience onboarding sellers so they can offer their customers a more diverse range of products from around the world,” said Alex McCrea, Head of Fintech Partnerships – CEMEA at Visa. “Detected offers businesses a seamless compliance solution that enables them to grow and remain competitive. We are delighted to welcome Detected into Visa’s Fintech Partner Connect program.”