API Days 2019 began in Puddle Dock London with keynotes from Google Cloud (Apigee) explaining how to build better products by better serving the Open Banking ecosystem and redefining the meaning of a brand and from FDATA Global explaining exactly how Open Banking affects all the key stakeholders within the ecosystem.

Throughout the conference, there were numerous sessions ranging from strategies for adopting Open Banking and the challenges Open Banking presents to banks to workshops explaining how to leverage GraphQL and talks about the security concerns that Open Banking present to fintechs.

Yapily and IBM

Yapily had quite a presence at the conference including a well-attended session from IBM’s Carlo’s Marcoli (API Economy Solutions Leader) who spoke on the lessons learnt in creating PSD2 solutions and what the future holds for Open Banking.

IBM’s Carlo Marcoli showing Yapily’s involvement in IBM’s PSD2 compliant API offering

In this talk, Carlo highlighted how Yapily is a great means for IBM to offer secure PSD2 compliant APIs to its customers due to it’s 97% coverage of all UK accounts, it’s normalisation of endpoints and data across an ever growing list of bank integrations and the ease of obtaining account information and performing payment initiation with each integration. To read more about the partnership, check out the following IBM announcement During this talk, Carlo demonstrated how existing IBM Cloud users can access Yapily’s Open Banking APIs through IBM App Connect. The intuitive UI allows users to easily integrate Yapily into their applications by providing their Yapily application credentials as shown below:

Yapily’s integration in IBM’s App Connect Cloud offering

In this integration, users are met with a flow-based UI to programmatically define processes to run in sequence while abstracting the finer details related to the various API endpoints. App Connect even provides an Open Banking template which will get all transactions for all accounts that a user has successfully authorised consents to and store them in IBM Cloudant document once issued with the user’s Yapily application and Cloudant credentials:

IBM App Connect’s sample open banking template empowered by Yapily APIs

With the intuitive UI powered by Yapily, users can quickly create interesting use case e.g. alerts for when a particular consent have expired or for when the balance of a particular account has hit a pre-configured threshold. To learn about Yapily’s integration in IBM App Connect in more detail, Carlo’s three-part blog series is a great resource.

Yapily and GraphQL

Yapily also made an appearance in the GraphQL track with a talk from Yapily’s CTO Joao Martins who showed how easy it is to connect to banks with a live demo demonstrating the payment initiation flow from his Revolut account to his Starling account in a matter of minutes.

By using GraphQL, Joao showed how he could easily query Yapily backend services obtaining payloads with only key information e.g. only the id, authorisation url and createdAt time stamp when issuing a payment authorisation request from his Revolut account:

A Yapily payment authorisation request using GraphQL

The filtered response from the payment authorisation request

Joao explained how this intuitive syntax allows for familiar processes like payment initiation flows to be a trivial exercise for developers who use Yapily APIs. It is obvious which variables are requested for on the client side and that is exactly what you receive. This means that a front-end which would usually consume this data via. REST would no longer need to do any extra processing or filtering for nested properties due to over-fetching meaning an all-round better developer experience.