Using APIs to increase security

By collaborating with APIs, organizations can become more secure as a whole. One such example occurred in the Open Banking Initiative that started in Europe but has since spread in popularity to North America.

The Open Banking Initiative began in January 2016, when the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK issued a directive ordering the country’s nine largest banks to open up their customer data to third-party providers

Since then, it has become valuable because it has allowed financial institutions to create Open APIs that outside organizations and their third-party developers can leverage, according to MuleSoft in a blog post

Rather than opening up the APIs to attack, the initiative enabled a secure form of data exchange that accelerates collaboration with outside organizations and has decreased the risks associated with screen scraping, a technique used by programs to extract data from the human-readable output of a computer application.

Screen scraping is insecure because it requires customers to provide third-party aggregators with login credentials and it also pushes significant traffic to servers with every “scrape ”

Open Banking initiatives offer financial institutions the opportunity to safely collaborate with third-party developers t h ro u g h A P I s U n l i ke sc re e n sc ra p i n g , t h i s se c u re d a ta exchange is API-enabled and does not strain or overload servers z