Rather than viewing the development of APIs as a regulatory cost burden, banks should strive to realise the considerable monetisation opportunites afforded by the trend, according to a new report from the Mobey Forum's Open Banking Expert Group.
Based on a year-long research study, the report leverages the expertise of open banking experts across leading Tier One banks and global institutions.
The group determined that significant monetisation opportunities exist beyond those initially expected and, most notably, many of these opportunities are for ‘internally facing’ use cases, which present lower risk and higher return.
According to the report, the simplest business case for banks is through direct monetisation of so-called Premium APIs, which involves charging third parties for access and use of a bank’s APIs beyond the standard free offerings required by, for example, compliance to the EU’s PSD2 regulation.
The research found that this type of direct, external-facing monetisation can enable banks to recover the cost of creating and publishing core compliance APIs, and that increasing the number of products available via APIs, together with offering enhanced performance levels, generates significant monetisation opportunities.
Internally, use of APIs can also facilitate the sharing of data across otherwise siloed departments within a bank that leads to efficiency gains.
Elina Mattila, executive director, Mobey Forum, says: “Economic pressures, dwindling profit margins and increasing compliance and regulatory requirements mean that banks are searching for new ways to increase revenue with value-added services. The monetisation of APIs can help banks unlock new efficiencies and generate new revenue streams. Yes, the monetisation use cases explored in the report are still in their infancy. Nonetheless, they still represent billions per year to the medium to large bank segment.”