News & Insights

INNOPAY and Deutsche Bank have jointly published a new white paper titled ‘Into the great wide open: Building blocks for a successful API programme’.

The white paper provides answers to questions such as how the path to an open organisation can succeed, which roles, skills and processes characterise a successful API programme, and how the marketing of API-based products can be designed. The white paper is intended to encourage companies in all sectors to recognise the advantages of API-based business models and to use them for their own benefit.

The strategy for the digitalisation of the financial sector adopted by the EU Commission in September 2020 as part of a broader digitalisation package leaves little room for doubt – there is no way around the topics of Open Banking and Open Finance.

Many banks have already recognised that PSD2 is just the beginning of a larger movement towards a financial services sector characterised by open data exchange. Among them is Deutsche Bank, which started opening up its organisation back in 2015 with its dbAPI programme.

The growing importance of APIs is not only due to the latest developments in the banking sector, but marks a cross-industry trend towards an Open Data economy. In order to become an open organisation, however, it is not enough to merely provide data, products or services through APIs. Instead, a far-reaching transformation of the entire organisation is required. The white paper presents a holistic model of the necessary building blocks and steps for opening up companies to provide them with guidance in this transformation process.

To illustrate the implementation of those theoretical building blocks, the white paper uses Deutsche Bank’s dbAPI programme. The case study shows concrete steps, learning experiences and pitfalls in the process to open up a large internationally operating company. As a result, this joint white paper ultimately provides answers to questions such as how the path to an open organisation can succeed, which roles, skills and processes characterise a successful API programme, and how the marketing of API-based products should be designed.

The white paper is intended to encourage companies in all sectors to recognise the advantages of API-based business models and to use them for their own benefit.

The white paper is available in German here and in English here.

INNOPAY supports and guides companies from a range of industries in their process to open up. It also publishes the annual INNOPAY Open Banking Monitor, the leading benchmark based on its research into the developments in the financial services sector. If you are interested in discussing the insights from this white paper or need direct support for your own API programme, please contact our expert Karl Illing.