The Top 3 API Economy Trends for Business Growth in 2023

By Rakshith Rao, CEO and Co-founder of APIwiz

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are like the arteries and veins of the internet, sending a continuous blood flow of information through its networks. Still, it’s their business value that makes them a vital factor for growth and keeps the blood pumping. 

Digital transformation across industries means that the majority of initial interactions a customer has with a business will be digital-first, and, as a result, APIs are a major investment area. By 2025, Gartner predicts that 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur online. So businesses can maximize their investment in digital strategies by optimizing their API management to prevent disruption to users and get the most value out of their cyber ecosystems.  

Automated documentation and full discoverability will be fundamental for ensuring high levels of API maturity. Maturity is valuable in API ecosystems as it allows internal teams to collaborate and leverage existing APIs effectively. Similarly, APIs will form a key pillar in architectures designed to offer microservices and enable businesses to scale easily and at a pace that keeps them ahead of their competition. 

With going digital-first in mind, let’s find out what the top three API trends for business growth will be in 2023. 

Trend 1: Discoverability

Discovery is essential for your API program's success, with documentation and automation having key roles in making discoverability possible. 

While there has been a great focus on innovation across industries to offer a better customer and user experience (UX) through APIs, these burgeoning API ecosystems can throw a new set of security, compliance & governance challenges if not run efficiently. 

If a business has 2500 APIs running but can only discover and observe 2150 from their documentation, that leaves 350 APIs unobservable, vulnerable, and all operating to increase the threat to the system. 

Whether looking for what can be leveraged internally or opening your APIs to third parties, businesses need to take stock of what they have to take part in the API economy. 

This type of in-house digital spring cleaning requires enterprises to ask:

• How many APIs do we have? 

• How many services?

• Where are these deployed? 

• Who is consuming them, and to what extent?

• How are these APIs and services being leveraged?

• Do I really need 40 versions of the same API?

• Is version 38 even being used at all?

Although opening your APIs for third-party integration is one way to participate in the API economy, much more can be done by businesses to leverage their existing APIs. 

Once you know your API portfolio is fully documented and discoverable, it’s far easier for teams, especially global ones, to collaborate. Instead of spending time and money building from scratch, sharing APIs internally means teams can leverage existing APIs for their own innovation. 

One of the biggest challenges to building a healthy API economy that fulfills its goals of improved UX is that no company has unlimited resources of time and money. The constraints, in addition to developer availability, limits the possibilities for taking business requirements and making them into a tangible product you can put in peoples’ hands. 

Recognizing inefficiencies in your systems will help you identify not only where costs can be saved, but where UX can be improved so as to attract and retain customers also. 

Trend 2: Microservices 

Microservices is an existing trend we will see continue in 2023. Breaking down services into their components allows businesses to rebuild and scale individual parts of their API ecosystems rather than redoing the entire system. 

Microservices is a paradigm change in API ecosystems being built. Financial technology (fintech) in banking is one example where API microservices is enabling digital transformation at rapid speed. With APIs, fintech is allowing banks to respond faster and more accurately to users’ needs through increased online services. 

Microservices, perhaps, is less a trend in itself and more the API movement that allows other trends to happen. As the name suggests, they are targeted specifically to individual tasks rather than multiple functions. This creates the possibility for more nimble and agile services as a result that can be integrated, scaled, or retired easily as needed—all without disruption to UX. 

The result of this type of localized approach to APIs and digital-first strategy is helping turn ideas into products faster, cut down their time to market, and accelerate business growth. 

Trend 3: Maturity 

If you don’t have a high level of maturity in your API program, it is impossible to scale with good governance and security for your endpoints in place. 

There are four stages of API program maturity wherein the APIs graduate from being agents of access to integration, and then an agent of crafting experiences, and finally transformation. A business’ API program maturity level will depend on its own evolution and can be accelerated with comprehensive API management. API lifecycle management data can be used to define the maturity of your API program and create metrics on how much time they’re taking to run and to fix if something goes down. 

API ecosystems need to determine whether they qualify within certain governance parameters, such as owning their own catalog, secure access controls, and common schema, with automation in place to regularly and correctly assess the maturity level of their program.

These metrics are useful for creating a maturity index of your API ecosystem to ensure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are being met. These can include:

• Business KPIs

• Operational KPIs

• Security KPIs

• Developer KPIs

Deriving a maturity index of your APIs and installing full lifecycle management across your API ecosystem is a game changer for enterprises. Indexing creates a clear overview of what APIs are in use, which ones need to be retired, and where resources for development should be focused. 

API lifecycle management through a dedicated platform gives businesses secure access to data insights. With analytics in place, businesses can maximize their investments and ensure a high maturity level for their API programs. 

When businesses have higher API program maturity levels and securely automated API management strategies in place, they fuel growth with better discoverability, compliance, and documentation. Existing APIs can then be leveraged for reusability saving time and costs for teams.  

Businesses can take these API trends for 2023 to create digital-first strategies focusing on API management for growth. What’s more, UX can be streamlined and allows them to respond quickly to trends and changing customer expectations, keeping new and existing customers happy, and further protecting company bottom lines.