Barclays UK
Introduction of the Portal
Barclays was built over centuries. Our longevity is an extraordinary achievement, especially against the backdrop of multiple financial crises, international conflicts, and the agricultural, industrial and now technological revolutions. We have built a world-class API Exchange to serve a new growing community of digital first businesses. The API Exchange is a global API platform empowering communities of businesses, developers and innovators by providing secure access to new products via APIs. We are continuously making improvements to the API Exchange based on developer feedback and research.
At the end of 2020, the Barclays API Exchange underwent a series of changes to not only improve the user journeys, but to cut down on the number of tickets developers raise and ensure a smoother API onboarding for our developers. After looking at drop off rates and gathering data from our support teams, we could see developers were finding dead ends in their journey that lead to frustration and more tickets being raised. In early 2021, we introduced help guides that guided users through a step by step process, complete with video and links to the next steps. This has translated successful and we are now seeing a reduction in the number of tickets being raised.
Why nominated
Best Internal DevPortal
As a global organisation Barclays has a broad community of Developers aligned to various business areas, each building different capabilities to better serve our customers. Barclays API Network is the key in bringing all of that together; driving our internal API ecosystem, benefiting colleagues, and aiding efficiencies across our business by promoting API discovery and re-use. Offering a maturity score and showing the status of APIs through the development lifecycle, allows potential consumers to judge whether a service is best-fit for their project. Barclays API Network also contains workflows and tooling to simplify internal processes including onboarding onto the bank’s various API platforms/hosting environments. API documentation and specifications, deployment history, NFT statics, pipeline and configuration data; can all be consumed from the portal.
In addition, Barclays API Network acts as a community hub for Developers to visit and is central to communicating API strategies, product updates and training material. This promotes investment in our development teams & colleagues, allows us to share industry trends and news, and furthers the internal API agenda.
Best findability of Products in a DevPortal
The API Exchange recognises the sales funnel and benefits that Search and therefore SEO offers as the primary avenue for new traffic to reach our developer portal. The investment in SEO is key to support the Developer navigating directly to the content to serve their needs. Furthermore, the API Exchange has invested in linking key journeys together to support way finding. This enables linking and the natural flow of journeys; Sandbox App creation dashboard view, to our guides of ‘How do I take this API to Production’. As a result of this, we have naturally seen a reduction in support Tickets, as the API Exchange is involving to become self-service, enabling our Developer community to quickly consume products and services.
Best Accessible DevPortal
To ensure Barclays provides world class Accessibility, Barclays have a dedicated in-house accessibility team who we consult frequently during design changes. In addition, the UX/UI team within API Platforms also has an “Accessibility Champion” who cross skills our front end engineers, ensuring accessibility remains at the forefront of everything we do.
The Covid Pandemic has highlighted that accessibility is important now more than ever. Accessible websites help to keep everybody connected to the things that they care about and with the increasing shift to remote working, here at Barclays we believe it’s imperative we remain accessible to each and every user.
We’re incredibly proud to have won the award in 2019 and 2020 and are conscious not to rest on our laurels and continuously improve our offering. After rolling out Dark Mode late 2020, we had to ensure that the accessibility standards of the site were upheld. We ensured that our content remains legible in Dark Mode and must be dark enough to display white text.
