apidays LIVE Jakarta 2021 - Accelerating Digitisation February 24, 2021 Connecting the digital economy in South East Asia with APIs Todd Schweitzer, CEO & Co-Founder at Brankas

1. APIs Connecting
the Digital
Economy in
Southeast Asia
24 February 2021

2. Hi, I’m Todd
• CEO and Founder of Brankas, an Open Banking tech company founded in 2016
• Today: Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand
• Soon: Vietnam, Bangladesh, Malaysia
• Brankas is building “Open Banking” technology for emerging economies:
• Helping Banks launch Open API products (tech provider)
• Helping fintechs access and use Open APIs (API aggregator)
• Building regionwide fintech API infrastructure: APIX, Proxtera
• Our coverage:
○ 82% of Indonesian market
○ 60% of the Philippines market
○ First PISP (retail payments API) in Thailand, live with top 3 banks

3. The Open Finance Economy in SE Asia
• SE Asia financial services is undergoing regionwide tech disruption, to benefit of
customers
• Highly profitable (uncompetitive) while >60% unbanked
• Big Tech battleground: Tencent, Ant, SEA, Grab, Gojek/Tokopedia)
• New digital banks and non-bank alternatives
• Open Finance API Development: Industry led
• Banks, fintechs seeing commercial value in API development
• Regulators setting guidelines for customer consent, data security, minimum
technology standards.
• Open Finance APIs solving fundamental gaps: identity, payments, credit scoring
This is not UK Open Banking!

4. Fintech APIs in the Real World
Examples from SE Asia (and Beyond)

5. Fintech API Products we see in SE Asia
1. Account information / statement sharing (AISP)
- Credit scoring
- Identity verification
- Accounting and budgeting
2. Payments without a middleman
- eCommerce Checkout: bank transfer, installments, pay with points
- Pull funds into bank / ewallet app
- New standardized QR payment in PH, ID, TH
- Corporate disbursements API
- Biller aggregation
3. Account opening / origination
- Deposit accounts
- Loan origination
- Retail bonds
4. Authentication and Single Sign-On

6. Direct Debit “Pull Payments” (PISP model)
Gcash e-wallet

7. Account Opening through Partner Apps
Gcash e-wallet CIMB Bank Savings Account

8. Statement Aggregation - Personal (AISP)

9. Statement Aggregation - Corporate

10. Third Party Authentication
🇸🇬
🇹🇭

11. Financing through eCommerce Merchant Site

12. Financing through eCommerce Merchant Site
Multifinance Bank Startup Startup eWallet Bank
Startup Bank Bank Startup Bank

13. Marketplace and Platform Models
UnionBank #7 Bank in
Philippines
Shift to Digital-First
Strategy
Separate entity for
venture capital + new
products, UBX.ph

14. Marketplace and Platform Models
• Siam Commercial
Bank (SCB), #3
bank in Thailand
• eCommerce
“mall” inside
bank app
• One-click
checkout, all SCB

15. Marketplace and Platform Models

16. Marketplace and Platform Models

17. Banking as a Service
● BaaS is a model that allows
third parties to connect with
banks' systems directly via APIs
● Third parties build banking
offerings on top of the
providers' regulated
infrastructure
● Monetization usually:
○ monthly license, and/or
○ usage fee for each service
Source: Business Insider, Solarisbank

18. Banking as a Service
Source: Business Insider, Solarisbank

19. Open Banking Readiness Framework
Level 1
Traditional
Architecture
Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Level 5
Open Banking
Enabled
API
Architecture
Monolith architecture, No
API gateway, Limited
internal APIs
Internal API Gateway in
use.
External gateway deployed.
Some APIs registered.
All API services routed
through Internal/External
API gateways.
Gateways are also load
balancers directing traffic to
horizontally-scaled
deployments.
Internal and external API
gateways. Clustered
deployments with
Orchestration layer
API Services Point-to-point integrations
with external partners
Basic metadata APIs, e.g.
FX, interest rates
Limited API services,
transaction-oriented API
definitions
Main API services available,
aligned with PSD2 and
international standards
Advanced product APIs
e.g., Account opening,
eKYC; API lifecycle mgmt.
Developer
Experience
Direct contacts and
requests only, no public
documentation,
advertisement or contact
form
Limited developer portal; no
self onboarding
Published API docs,
advertisement of
availability, contact us form.
Manual approval for testing
access
Self serve developer portal
and testing environment
Sandbox and live
environments with dummy
data and accounts; Use
cases by activity, industry,
user type; Notification
framework
Metrics and
Monitoring
n/a Logs maintained, not
searchable or accessible.
Metrics not yet in place, rely
on customer service to spot
bugs (no real-time
monitoring)
Logging for retention
purposes, minimally
accessible.
Limited use of API gateway
monitoring features with
short/med retention.
Searchable interface for
recent historical logs.
Real-time monitoring and
alerting with
always-available log
filtering/reporting.
Retention via
downsampling and/or
archiving

20. Thank you!
todd@brank.as