Nations Open API Banking to revolutionize banking in Sri Lanka
Nations Trust Bank PLC (NTB) is facilitating disruption in the local marketplace by providing its application programming interfaces (APIS) freely to app developers under the Nations Open API Banking initiative.
“The future of banking will be one of the safe public spaces, openness and inclusivity. This is why we have taken the initiative to launch Nations Open API Banking, creating a framework for collaborative innovation and progress like never seen before. We are proud to be the first bank in Sri Lanka brave enough to take this definitive step towards the future,” NTB Ceo/director Renuka Fernando told a press conference held to announce the initiative, yesterday.
Start-ups, tech-savvy individuals, corporates, SMES and independent app developers could use the 26 APIS published by NTB, Fernando added.
NTB COO Thilak Piyadigama said that the ERP automation, cash flow management, online payments and fund transfers could be facilitated by the APIS provided.
“It will reduce your internal processes by half,” he said.
The APIS will be available on www.openapi.nationstrust.com for interested parties to tinker with and test, although fully commercial operations would have to pay commercial terms for using the APIS, Piyadigama said.
“Other payment gateways, you have to pay before you experiment. We let you experiment and then pay,” he added.
Fernando said that the terms of payment for using the APIS will depend on the size and nature of businesses.
All entities using the APIS for business purposes by developing apps would have to become NTB account holders, while the end users of these entities could transact using any bank account, Piyadigama said.
He added that the APIS open up unlimited possibilities for businesses and guaranteed the safety of the APIS, which conform to the highest international standards, currently represented by the European Union’s PSD2 Directive.
“The possible use cases for open banking are virtually limitless. At a consumer level, an important area will be electronic payments. Using our Payment APIS retailers can now integrate their POS systems with our own systems to allow customers to pay directly from their bank accounts, with no middlemen, which means lower transaction costs.
Large and small companies can massively benefit by using our APIS to integrate their systems with ours and remove repetitive tasks in dayto-day activities. Let’s take payrolls for example. Once a company’s systems are integrated with ours, their employees can then be paid directly, without separately updating companyside systems and then logging into Internet banking and sending instructions to the bank. For startups, the potential is huge, allowing them to access customer data and even provide third party financial services,” Padiyagama said.
He also said that the country’s largest corporate, John Keells Holdings PLC (JKH), has introduced the Frimi app based on NTB APIS for customers to pay their bills at Keells Super outlets in four seconds, which is expected to fall to two seconds in the future and that NTB is also helping JKH automate many internal processes using the APIS.