WebAPI: an integration platform and public API for the bank

Long before the EU's PSD2 directive was drafted, long before public APIs became a trend in the banking sphere, and even long before these ideas became mainstream, our team already knew that public REST API gateways powered by cloud solutions were the way to go for banks.

In 2014, Česká spořitelna approached us with the idea of building a simple mobile app that would give clients read-only access to their personal accounts. We humbly suggested they think bigger.

Together, we developed a custom-made cloud integration platform for both the bank's internal use and external use by its clients.

Today, WebAPI is the heart of the bank's infrastructure and gives it a 21st-century public interface. Most of the bank's projects, including the George internet banking, run on the WebAPI platform. The platform is currently also being adopted by the whole Erste Group.

The bank is miles ahead of its competitors:

• A significant subset of the bank's APIs was exposed publicly to third-party developers, so they can design and test their own layer of applications on top of it.
• All cloud services were exposed in a standardized, uniform manner (RESTful API) to avoid integration chaos and reduce costs.
• WebAPI provides a massively scalable infrastructure that handles more than 8 million requests a day, supported by an easy-to-use developer portal. The platform can be reconfigured live and instantly with zero downtime.
• The bank received the tools to manage the complex system and redistribute resources where needed: limiting the amount and duration of requests, managing access to services in one place, collecting audit logs for analysis, and much more.

• 4 years in production
• 2 years before PSD2
• 8M requests a day
• 10 monks working on the project

Does switching from monoliths to microservices sound good? How about jumping to the cloud from server racks? If this resonates with you, reach out to us for a head start in the FinTech industry. Take advantage of our years of experience and the expertise our team has gained working with the largest bank in the country.