About
Open Banking from Original Bank – one of the first banks in the world to open its APIs to 3rd party developers.
Innovation presentation
The Original bank was launched in April/2016 and it’s the first 100% full digital bank in Brazil. We were launched with no branches and with a 100% online process to open an account – no papers needed and full bank services available.
Keeping the fast pace to present innovations to the market, the Original Bank is the 1st bank in Latin America to open its APIs to 3rd party developers. The project was conceived to bring the Fintech speed to our service delivery, allowing partners to implement financial services integrations with any 3rd party application, in a fast and secure way.
The conceptualization phase of this project involved a lot of benchmark research to decide the best overall user experience. Most of our inspirations were from outside of the bank sector. Developers platforms from Google, Facebook and Stripe were used to understand the most important functionalities and the best structure to the API documentation.
The project was developed by the innovation team in partnership with the IT and the Security teams in 12 months. The Open Banking allows 3rd party developers to access the API documentation through https://developers.original.com.br, along with a sandbox they can use for experimentations, and finally, the whole process to submit applications to analysis can be done using the website. The project was launched with four APIs: Original Connect, Original Accounts, Original Investments and Original Payments, all detailed in the next section.
Our first integration will be launched in October/2016 allowing Original clients to make peer-to-peer payments and shopping payments using a startup app called “PICPAY”.
Uniqueness of the project
Since the beginning the Original bank accepted the challenge to be ahead in
financial service innovations and we are looking deeply at what the industry movements are in order to innovate fast and often.
This project is unique in its bold implementation of APIs, web services and software architecture technologies mainly used in fast internet companies and startups, all unheard of in the Brazilian context of banking.
It is disruptive in the sense that we know that, due to the outdated technological systems, banks are having a hard time to make integrations with new systems, to build APIs and it’s even harder to open them. In the global market you can find few examples of banks with open APIs. The most structured case is the BBVA API Market (https://www.bbvaapimarket.com) that since last December is in alpha phase.
The Original Bank has already started its construction using modern technologies, incrementing 3rd wave technologies, and bridging the gap between present and future trends in software development. We know that our APIs will allow 3rd party integrations, faster software developments, exclusive experiences and it will give us the opportunity to be ahead of the market.
The Open Banking project is using the best practices in API development, security standards and API lifecycle not only to open one of the first bank APIs but also to offer the best bank APIs in the global market.
The first four APIs available at launch date were:
. Original Connect: enables Original Clients to give 3rd party apps their consent to access Original services in their name.
. Original Accounts: allows pre-authorized users to access their balance, balance history and transaction history.
. Original Investments: allows pre-authorized users to access their portfolio summary and investments history.
. Original Payments: provides third party apps the ability to offer pre-authorized users transfer services between Original Bank accounts.
