For decades, Rabobank has grown to become one of the largest banks in the Netherlands. And while today they pride themselves on being a corporation that serves private clients and agricultural finance, they’ve also been growing and adapting their API prowess as a user of Kong Gateway and Kong Konnect.
We sat down with members of the Rabobank team at API Summit 2024 to discuss how their API initiatives are improving efficiency, security, and scalability. If you belong to a team in the highly regulated finance industry and are looking at how an API-first approach can help you, be sure to catch the insights revealed below.
“We’ve been running Kong Konnect for a year and a half, and I think we can say that it really has an established position in the bank as the API management platform,” said Frank van Valkenburg, Business Architect on the Integration team at Rabobank. “Kong has become a known name in Rabobank for its association with API management. And we’re a big company. We’ve learned that API management is really business critical.”
Frank said about 300 teams work on the Kong platform today, but overall, the teams are focused on Day-2 operations — maintaining stability, establishing monitoring, and attending to lifecycle management.
“I think we’re really good. And I think we’re also still growing,” he said.
Shweta Tiwari agrees. She’s a Solution Architect at Rabobank who said the API growth has been tremendous.
“We pulled the data, and it was two billion calls per month,” Shweta said. “On a yearly basis, we grew around 40% just on API traffic. And services around 20%. Services are new APIs being brought into the bank, so that’s quite nice. And with the introduction of Kong, it’s only risen."
Needless to say, Kong Konnect is being utilized heavily at Rabobank. Shweta said that growth is even more than they expected year over year.
“With Kong Konnect, we chose a federated API gateway model,” Frank said. “But we took it one step further — isolated gateways for each team. So now we’re running these mini gateways all across Rabobank. And we could do that because of how lightweight Kong is.”
Being a lightweight solution is a differentiator for Kong, Frank said. Today, it’s become an enabler for Rabobank’s whole API management landscape, which they only have plans to expand in the future.
Because they’re a bank, the company has standards and governance across all its API management, but Kong Konnect is at the center of it, tying together all API extensions their providers use in an automated way.
“Our providers use their APIOps. They run some pipelines. They deploy APIs to Kong in their isolated gateways. That’s the approach we chose for Rabobank, and it’s been working quite well for us,” Frank said.
With the growth and move to Day-2 operations regarding API management at Rabobank, how do APIs now fit into their overall approach to IT?
“We want teams to operate as autonomously as possible,” Frank said. In that sense, they endeavor to offer everything engineers need as a service — which actually means as an API. “We make it self-service. It’s self-explanatory. It’s easy to use. The API platform is enabling that standardization.”
– Frank van Valkenburg, Business Architect, Integration, Rabobank
Standardization, scalability, and efficiency? They’re all there in Rabobank’s current setup with Kong Konnect. But what about security?
Frank points out the excellent observability his teams now have around the platform with this architecture. There’s been tremendous growth when it comes to API usage, but thanks to the ownership around APIs Rabobank now commands, they’re able to see anything strange happening within that traffic.
“We could very easily identify whose API was being called because we have this good ownership,” Shweta recalled about a recent incident, “And we could reach out to the people calling it. It was someone testing something, but it came up as an anomaly in our traffic detection.
Frank and Shweta point to the fact that Kong Konnect overarching everything enables them to have a central overview of what happens on the entire platform. Without that, spotting incidents and reaching out to those responsible would have been hard to achieve.
Bringing an API architectural vision like Rabobank’s to life doesn’t happen overnight — or without help. At API Summit 2024, the Rabobank team took the time to answer questions about their relationship with Kong over the last few years.
“Whenever I think of Kong and Rabobank, we work together as a cohesive unit,” Frank said. “And I’ve been involved since the RFP phase when we were choosing Kong . . . The vision that we had and the changes that have happened have been possible because there was a lot of trust between Rabobank and Kong. We are able to do the design we have today because of that flexibility and trust.”
In Frank's mind, this hasn’t been a typical consumer/supplier relationship, but a partnership. And that works very well for his teams.
“Sometimes we are in sessions together where we don’t know who is from Kong and who’s from Rabobank anymore because we are filling in each other’s words and sentences,” Frank said.
As for what’s next, the Rabobank team expects even more expansion and usage of APIs across the org. The benefits of bringing more and more isolated gateways and self-service solutions to teams within the firm have been obvious, and they’d like to bring even more in.
“Before, pipeline runs used to take us thirty minutes to one hour. Now it’s fully containerized and goes really smoothly. From 30–60 minutes to… fast. Very fast,” Frank said.
Expansion with Kong for Rabobank means bringing it to other regions, gateways, and clouds the firm has operations in as well. Rabobank is on Microsoft Azure today but moving to AWS soon. The expansion there will make Kong the de facto API management platform within Rabobank.
Want to explore more stories of how organizations are adapting to evolving industry requirements while growing their competitive edge? Explore other customer stories or watch Kong customer sessions from API Summit.
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