Maximizing efficiency: how single APIs are revolutionizing cross-border payments

We explore how single APIs are streamlining the integration process for cross-border payment platforms, reducing development time and costs, and enabling faster time-to-market.

Every company will be a fintech company. And any company can offer financial services, as venture firm Andreessen Horowitz famously said back in 2019. Five years on, the growth in as-a-service offerings – software, infrastructure, banking and so on – means that almost any business can embed payment at the point of need.

Think about that for a second.

Businesses can connect customers to their money, even if they’re not a bank or payments company. They can ‘embed’ financial services, including cross-border payments, into their platforms and customer journeys. And can use this to drive revenue, growth, customer loyalty and more.

‘Revolution’ and its adjective ‘revolutionary’ are somewhat over-used. But when it comes to every company being a fintech company, dramatic and wide-reaching change is underway, enabled by APIs.

What is an API?

APIs, or application program interfaces, enable computer programs to communicate with one another. In a financial services context, APIs help businesses integrate things like initiating payments or getting account balances into their websites, mobile apps or business processes.

APIs power ‘out-of-the-box’ or ‘plug-and-play’ solutions. As these names suggest, businesses short-cut the time and cost involved in building banking and payments infrastructure themselves, helping them get to market faster and cheaper.

Can businesses have too much of a good thing?

The app-ification of financial services has broken banking and payments down into its constituent parts. This has created a hyper-specialized market, where providers compete to offer niche products and features.

The unbundling of services typically provided by a one-stop-shop provider, like a bank, has its pros and cons. More competition drives more choice and better quality overall, but results in the problem of choosing. That’s true irrespective of whether the transaction is B2C, B2B or B2B2B.

When it comes to APIs, maybe too many is too much of a good thing. It’s time to re-bundle and consolidate multiple functionalities into single APIs.

The benefits of single, unified payment APIs

Single payment APIs provide a unified interface for developers to interact with various payment methods, such as bank transfers, cards and digital wallets, to:

• Reduce complexity: Developers don’t need to understand the intricacies of the API for each payment method, when a single API handles the complexity internally.
• Save time: Integrating a single API is much faster than integrating several, freeing up developer resource for more value-adding activities.
• Drive cost efficiencies: A single API consolidates the efforts of developing and maintaining multiple APIs, reducing costs and driving efficiencies.
• Scale fast: Single APIs are often designed to be scalable, meaning businesses can add new payment methods or features without significant change to the integration. This enables them to adapt to changing market demands and customer preferences faster.
• Compete strongly: Simplified integration and fewer APIs to develop and maintain means businesses can launch and capture market share more quickly and compete strongly.

Inpay allows you to gain access to our entire global network through a single, simple API connection.This helps you scale faster,  improve efficiency, increase interoperability, and create new revenue streams.