Regardless of the industry they're in, most enterprises are striving to keep pace with changing consumer demands. As customers adjusted to new social parameters at the start of the pandemic, so have their expectations for a more seamless shopping experience. The demand for IT innovation takes on new urgency as 40 million more people across Southeast Asia came online for the first time in 2020.
The proliferation of devices and applications has underscored the importance of IT agility. For businesses today, application programming interfaces (APIs) have become the indispensable connective tissue to connect data, applications and systems. APIs allow businesses to scale quickly and react better to digitally tightened gaps.
Today's brands recognise the difficulty in building a personalised customer experience due to siloed customer data, distributed identity, and extended development cycles.
Living in an era of hyper-personalisation
Today's consumers have grown accustomed to the highly curated online shopping experience, and hyper-personalisation is the top-of-the-line method for a business to tailor their products to the "right customer." Having a comprehensive perspective of data will provide businesses with meaningful and actionable insights to understand and identify their customer demand.
Well-designed, efficient and agile APIs are the backbone of running a digital business successfully. APIs are programming codes that allow data transfer between applications (and their associated services and products) to talk to each other in an interconnected world.
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At the current pace of application development, APIs help developers speed up software development for customer-facing applications, open applications up to third parties for new use cases, and connect and streamline internal business operations. APIs play critical roles in the real world, whether we realise it or not.
The value APIs bring in real-life scenarios
APIs are used within a great variety of sectors, as they provide useful business opportunities to enhance customer requirements and relevance.
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For instance, insurance carriers could use APIs to give controlled access to third-party agents to get policy quotes. Instead of needing the carrier to process the request manually, APIs automate it for the agent to display quotes to the potential customer.
Singapore insurance carriers deliver end-to-end insurance transactional APIs for seamless and customised insurance protection and assistance across their website and applications. Anchoring on Insurance-as-a-Service (IaaS), their APIs streamline processes such as subscription, quotation, and customer policy issuance. In the age of the customer, businesses have to provide a seamless digital experience across their websites and mobile platforms to improve revenue and their chances of customer retention.
In the banking sector, APIs are set to be future-ready as customers want fluidity in their services and transactions through their digital wallets. In Malaysia, banks have established quick response (QR) payments through the use of APIs after banks saw more than a ten-fold growth in their transactions. The QR method provides automated processes that help businesses to enhance their productivity, allowing instant payments to be collected without the need to switch their payment process.
APIs also power many apps and capabilities in mobile devices and wearables that help navigate around the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries in Southeast Asia have developed contact tracing apps that can check for COVID-19 hotspots, vaccination appointments, check-in and check-out capabilities, and websites that provide the latest pandemic guidelines and information. In 2020, Malaysia had launched its app, MySejahtera, which composites all its features using APIs.
The foundations of autonomous driving in cars like Tesla are enabled by the power of APIs. The futuristic feature makes use of cameras, sensors data, and real-time processing ability. In a highly competitive automotive industry, Tesla is at the peak of highest customer satisfaction because of its personalised experience, treating its customers as individuals.
APIs must be a linchpin business priority
APIs have evolved from a technical requirement to becoming a linchpin business priority. The value of APIs expands as they enable companies to adopt automation-driven workflows.
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APIs enable collaboration between applications to carry out functions based on data sharing. They act as intermediaries, giving permission to developers to build new programmable interactions among the numerous programmes that people and enterprises utilise each day.
APIs also are vital in automated work processes, ensuring efficiency and operational reliability as well as allowing businesses to focus valuable time on other tasks.
Companies that adopt API-based systems within their business will progress from a hands-on workflow to relying on automated processes. This path is the way for end-to-end infrastructure visibility, ability to trace and observability.
The future of APIs is bright and critical for business innovation in a digital-first world. As we close chapter 2021 and enter a new year, immense opportunities lie ahead of us and we will continue to make progress and breakthroughs in a digital and connected fashion. Our lives will be better thanks to all the new and improved digital experiences, empowered by APIs and connectivity.
Degui Xu, Solutions Engineering at Kong Inc.
Photo: Unsplash
