Open Banking is a key digital transformation initiative in many countries. Its aim is to provide end users with more control of their financial data and to enable companies involved in banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) to quickly offer new services. The Kong-AWS partnership provides the right technology enabling these financial institutions to transform and meet the key requirements of Open Banking APIs.
What is Open Banking? And why is it important?
Open Banking allows banks to publish their APIs for use in developing new applications and services. With Open Banking, customers can access their accounts and other banking services through digital channels. And, if desired or required, the ability of third parties to perform transactions on behalf of customers can be enabled. Open Banking enables consumers and organizations to get access to numerous financial services and products without the overhead cost of traditional banking systems.
The Kong Enterprise Platform on AWS value proposition
The Kong Enterprise Platform for Open Banking on AWS provides banks with the control, flexibility, and tooling needed to automate and modernize their architecture to support Open Banking. This joint offering from Kong and AWS enables banks to drive innovation at scale and give them the ability to easily scale their infrastructure up and down based on current business requirements. It also drives stronger collaboration, re-usability, and higher return on investment.
The Kong Enterprise Platform for Open Banking provides financial institutions with the tooling needed to automate and modernize their architecture. Key elements of the Kong API Gateway include:
- APIOps, which provides powerful automation capabilities to integrate with existing CI/CD pipeline and modern DevOps practices
- Developer Portal to drive efficiency, collaboration, and re-usability of APIs
- Vitals to provide visual API analytics to see how APIs and Gateways are performing
- API security via fine-grained security and traffic policies that provide consistency across services and APIs
The Kong solution is cloud native and highly scalable. It offers low latency for improved performance and has a low total cost of ownership (TCO). Governance and compliance can be bottlenecks when it comes to building and deploying new APIs. However, with APIOps from Kong, this process is seamless and highly efficient.
AWS services are architected to be highly flexible and secure. The AWS cloud is built to satisfy the security requirements for the military, global banks, and other high-sensitivity organizations and is certified from various accreditation bodies across geographies and verticals.
Financial institutions can leverage the seamless Kong integration with AWS services, such as EKS and ECS, to experiment and innovate more quickly. Moreover, in order to comply with regulatory frameworks, Kong also integrates with ECS-Anywhere and EKS-Anywhere to deploy applications on-premise and give customers the options they need.
Customer proof points
Two major banks that have used Kong to support Open Banking initiatives are First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ).
FAB deployed Kong's service connectivity platform to modernize its microservice-driven banking platform and provide customers with innovative and secure products and services. A microservices approach combines multiple pieces of software, each responsible for a discrete function, to create applications supporting more complex functions.
The bank migrated away from a monolithic architecture to an API approach that leveraged Kong's Developer Portal and Open Banking plugin, in combination with Kong's OAuth 2.0 and Mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS). As a result, FAB cut operational costs by 57% and eliminated the need to continuously develop custom plugins.
Using Kong's Developer Portal enabled FAB to efficiently create a public-facing portal that provides API access for the outside developer community. The Kong Ingress Controller leverages Kubernetes functionality and provides a single point for simple API gateway management.
ANZ used Kong's lightweight and deployment-agnostic API gateway to facilitate swift development and deployment of new financial products and services based on Open Banking with strong security and authentication for managing highly sensitive consumer and partner financial data.
Open Banking reform measures in Australia were designed to enable customers to obtain tailored financial products and established deadlines for banks to comply with Open Banking requirements, including enabling customers to share their banking data with accredited third parties. ANZ also wanted to migrate some applications to the cloud while also supporting existing on-premises services.
No one could predict how extensively Open Banking would be adopted in Australia. Accordingly, ANZ chose Kong's lightweight and deployment-agnostic API gateway, which could quickly scale up or down to meet unpredictable Open Banking demand and to facilitate swift development and deployment into cloud-hosted Kubernetes. A Kong Open ID Connect plugin provided access to payload validation through the gateway.
An unparalleled platform for Open Banking
Open Banking initiatives offer BFSI companies the opportunity to generate new revenue streams and enhance customer satisfaction by enabling the companies to quickly launch innovative digital services tailored to the needs of their customers. The Kong Enterprise Platform for Open Banking on AWS enables financial institutions to transform, create new value and deliver better, more secure digital experiences to their customers.
Want to learn more about why innovative enterprises choose Kong? See why Kong is king for modernization.