Finance Monthly April 2019 Edition

38 www.finance-monthly.com Whatever business you’re in, you know perfectly well the new realities of commerce: Customers expect sophisticated services across the digital domain. Markets and competitors change at internet speed – while legacy IT infrastructure does not. And data is the electricity that flows through it all: difficult to control but also immensely powerful. ontrolling data is modern commerce’s greatest challenge - particularly in the rapidly changing financial services sector. Building smart controls that can extract, filter and combine data to feed business logic, frees developers to mix and match sources quickly and reliably. Those controls are APIs (Application Programming Interface), explains Carlos Oliveira from Spinr. They handle the complexities of each data source, hiding the mechanical details of access and control, and translate data to a common format. Once a common API or network of APIs has been created for data sources, any conceivable application or service can be built to that API. How does that work in practice? Consider the commercial environment facing a typical up-and-coming FinTech company. Thinking with APIs helps such a business get ahead of the market. Hundreds of new, technology-based firms are starting up every year, and they are giving more established competitors a run for their money. The lesson is clear: APIs are driving business growth today, WHAT ARE APIs AND ARE THEY USEFUL? Carlos Oliveira, Founder & CEO of Spinr C www.spinr. io ASK THE EXPERT - APIs