Digitisation is having a huge impact across many industries and financial services is no exception. It’s not always easy for large financial institutions to move with the times due to their large and complex legacy systems, but with the rapid pace of change in the market, standing still is not an option.

New entrants are arriving into the financial services market with state of the art systems, processes and ideas and they are disrupting the status quo. Customers now demand and expect the same digital journeys they experience as consumers for their financial services interactions, and this has opened the door for the new entrants to establish themselves in what were traditionally perceived as closed markets.

The digitisation of financial services is exciting because everything is up for grabs: companies who don’t embrace change will be left behind, which can only lead to improvements for customers and efficiencies for businesses. Financial services companies everywhere are re-evaluating their systems and processes and adapting to the challenges and obstacles in their way.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are not a new concept but they are becoming increasingly important as the requirement for the integration of applications grows. The ease with which your application integrates with other applications and systems can be the difference between success and failure.

As a service provider, Acquis needs to be able to provide its services to its clients as seamlessly as possible. Whether this is in communication with our client’s customers or communication directly with our clients, Acquis’ processes and systems need to meet the digital demands of our clients and their customers.

Acquis’ APIs facilitate the direct integration with client systems to transfer data back and forth in real time. There are several benefits to using our APIs, such as, client systems being able to integrate more quickly with Acquis, no need for manual intervention in the data transfer process, greater data integrity and quality, systems remain up to date with real-time information compared to delayed batch processing.

We’re already successfully using APIs with clients to improve the data transfer process. Clients who’ve worked with us for a long time will be familiar with the weekly or monthly process of uploading data files to our SFTP service. By introducing APIs we have automated this process to make it more efficient. Files are no longer processed overnight in batches, instead, thanks to the API, our system speaks directly with our clients’ system and will provide an instant real-time response. And by removing the need for manual intervention there’s less room for error.

Increasingly, clients will only work with us on a fully digital basis and keeping ahead with the advances in technology means we are able to continually improve the way we work and make it easier for our clients to do business with us.