Introduction
At NatWest Group, we’ve been building the Bank of APIs – a digitised, API-enabled bank that is empowering our customers and partners with direct connectivity to banking services through additional, convenient channels.
The Bank of APIs website is where our customers and partners can discover the full range of NatWest Group’s API products – from APIs that provide direct access to our foreign exchange services to APIs that can transform the way customers send and receive money.
We offer over 40 APIs on the site, serving customers across seven of our brands: NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank, Coutts, NatWest International, RBS International and Mettle.
Of those APIs, over 80% are non-mandatory. The breadth and quantity of APIs offered on the Bank of APIs site demonstrates how far NatWest Group has gone above and beyond providing the minimum set of APIs that banks have been required to offer in response to Open Banking.
Our APIs also cater to a wide range of customer segments – from individuals with everyday banking and wealth management needs, to small businesses and large corporates.
What’s more, our site features a dedicated Community section, where we share news of the events we hold for our customers and partners – such as our recent community event in London, or last year’s Global Open Finance Challenge – a first-of-its-kind event that invited innovators around the world to use our APIs to prototype new banking solutions that could help our customers and the public at large.
Why nominated?
Best Visual Design
Every aspect of the visual design on the Bank of APIs website has been designed with the user experience in mind – from the structure of our homepage to the layout of individual API product pages. This ensures a seamless customer journey from initial product exploration to building and testing applications with our APIs.
The site has also been designed with aesthetics in mind – using the bold and colourful visual elements of the NatWest brand.
From the moment users arrive on the homepage, the site’s visual design supports them with their needs – thanks to key sections being clearly signposted at the top, helping users intuit where to go.
Users can either head straight to our main product catalogue, to start browsing our APIs, or they can navigate directly to our Use Cases or Customer Segments sections, to learn more about the many ways in which our APIs can be used to benefit different types of customers.
What’s more, additional sections of the site are clearly signposted via a main navigation menu at the top. We also offer a powerful ‘search’ tool, to help users rapidly find the info they’re looking for on the site. The search results it presents can also be filtered to help users reach the exact page they need.
Once users arrive on an API product page, the visual presentation ensures that all info relating to the API is easy to digest and understand, which helps users immediately grasp the functions and benefits of each API.
All product pages also include a tab for documentation, where the technical steps for integrating our APIs are presented in a clear, easy-to-navigate way – plus include call-to-action buttons encouraging users to contact us to discuss opportunities to use the API, or to get started with testing it right away.
Best Served API Business Model
We recognise that, increasingly, our API consumers are not only developers, but also our business customers and partners.
That’s why, on our Bank of APIs website, we provide our customers and partners with sections tailored to their business needs – such as overviews of the customer segments our APIs can benefit, as well as use case examples bringing to life the ways APIs can be used to build compelling customer propositions.
Each of our APIs is also described clearly and concisely, on individual product pages, to give users an understanding of the data and services provided by each API product in a way that immediately resonates with them.
What’s more, not only do we provide an overview of our live APIs, but we also include all upcoming APIs in our catalogue – giving users the opportunity to have early sight of those APIs and express an interest in using them.
Users can also filter the APIs on our product catalogue page by customer segment, category and brand, to help provide an at-a-glance view of the APIs that will help with their use case needs.
Each API product page is supplemented by a wide variety of helpful resources for developers, too, including in-depth technical documentation for each API, which provide step-by-step instructions on how to integrate the APIs with their systems, plus clear code examples of API responses and requests that can be easily reused.
What’s more, we provide registered users with a ‘teams’ feature, which enables our customers and partners to easily manage their team’s access to API documentation on the site.
We also offer all our APIs in a dedicated sandbox environment that developers can use to test solutions before go-live. In addition, we offer several soon-to-be-released APIs in our sandbox, which we encourage developers to test and experiment with. This allows us to capture valuable feedback, to help shape those APIs before they launch to market and to ensure our API consumers get maximum value from them.
It all adds up to our customers and partners being able to discover and evaluate the right API for their business needs, quickly and easily.
Best Use of Analytics in a Devportal
We provide users with a wide range of publicly available graphs, metrics and dashboards on our Bank of APIs site:
- A live dashboard displaying the operational status of our Open Banking APIs
- Metrics on API performance and availability across all NatWest Group brands
- Graphs displaying month-by-month figures for: API requests; API error rates; API average response times; and API consumers.
We’ve implemented these features on our site as we recognise the importance of our API consumers being able to have full transparency of the performance and availability of the APIs they’re relying on.
