Money Forward Inc. declared that 2017 will be the year which marks the start of the API era. APIs are ubiquitous—from Banking and Financial Services Industry (BFSI), to e-commerce. APIs are the now the heart of many ecosystems, as Digital Services fast become the key to business relations with partners.
It’s no different for us here at F5 Networks Asia Pacific, as we explored many of these conversations with our customers in their varying stages of Digital Transformation, with a few highlights to boot, such as:
- China: Online banking, payment platform supporting projects were popular topics
- Australia: Our keynote presentation at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2017 in Gold Coast on banking was very well-received
- Indonesia: We supported a project to develop and enhance the infrastructure of a Fintech company with application protection solutions
- Customer wins: We also had successful projects with Heritage Bank in Australia, Dutch-Bangla Bank Limited in Bangladesh
Although we have been providing various technologies to these customer bases, the rate of Digital Transformation in the BFSI is occurring at a much faster rate than expected, which brings me to my next point—I recently met an industry-leading analyst who has been following the BFSI for almost 20 years, and here are some interesting tidbits of information:
- BFSI organizations all over the world are struggling now in terms of top line revenue growth. However, their profit margins are still going strong—which is both fortunate, and unfortunate for them—as these organizations may not feel the urgency to innovate
- Organizations are looking to grow their average revenue from digital business from the current 20%, to about 45%
- A major trend in BFSI is for bigger players to partner with emerging Fintech start-ups—which has been a particularly popular move for traditional banking organizations
- While banking organizations still hold on to the significance and values of traditional business models, they do understand the importance for Digital Transformation and necessity to evolve
Out of the trends highlighted above, the fact that bigger organizations are looking to partner with emerging Fintech players is something that I’m particularly interested in. Why? Besides being proof for the quote which I introduced at the beginning of this blog, the greater significance is that APIs are becoming an ever more important element in our digital ecosystems.
With that being said, there are a couple of questions surrounding this trend:
- How will existing systems and data interact with external system from these partners?
- How can organizations manage application traffic and protect them from threats in the public networks?
- Assuming cloud as the choice for the new architecture, how can organizations deploy, manage, and protect themselves as seamlessly as they do for their apps in their own data center?
- Given that modern applications require frequent updates and changes to stay ahead of the competition and meet customer demands, how can developers best manage them?
These are all questions that Asia Pacific businesses face when they look to migrate their apps across environments during their Digital Transformation journeys. At F5 Networks, we recognize these issues, and given our proven track record in the industry, we’re expanding our conversations with our customers and peers to discuss and explore how we can work together to best meet each organization’s unique requirements.
More content to come, but feel free to reach out to me or anyone from the F5 team if you have your own Digital Transformation story to tell!
Keii can also be found on Facebook and LinkedIn.
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