APIs, a lever for simplifying and enhancing the customer experience
For several years now, APIs have been at the heart of the transformation of financial services, in Europe and around the world. In BtoB and BtoC, the move towards Open Banking, promoted in Europe by the PSD2 directive, is already well underway: new services are gradually being developed and the customer experience is being simplified. APIs also transform employees' day-to-day work by facilitating access to information and collaboration. Within Societe Generale's Global Banking and Investor Solutions division, more than 2,000 APIs have already been developed.
APIs play a central role in Societe Generale Group's digitisation strategy: they are one of the pillars underlying the evolution of our information systems and our long-term business model. As our tools, offers and services are increasingly interconnected with those of our customers, partners and service providers, APIs are an effective solution for building bridges between the different information systems in a simplified, standardised and secure way.
Streamline data exchanges, enable interoperability
Recently, for example, we announced a partnership with Kyriba's cloud platform: our clients will soon have a comprehensive treasury management solution (monitoring, payment and fraud management), notably allowing real-time monitoring of treasury positions, provisional management of liquidity flows, payment automation, multi-bank connectivity and ERP, and more. All of this is possible thanks to the widespread use of APIs, which facilitate data exchanges and interoperability.
The E-Sign service, offered by SG Markets, is another example of using APIs to simplify the customer experience: connected with various electronic signature providers, such as Docusign, Idemia and Luxtrusts, this solution allows our customers and partners to select the service they usually use to manage signature procedures.
Within Societe Generale's Global Banking and Ivestor Solutions activities, we have more than 2,000 APIs in production, more than half of which are reused by 6,000 computer professionals
A large part of our team of 6,000 computer professionals are working on APIs and all have adopted a single standard for their development. More than 2,000 APIs are currently in production, for internal or external use.
We regularly develop specific APIs in response to our clients' unique needs. For a large French corporate group, for example, we've developed an API designed to optimise the intraday reporting process. This enables information to be reported through personalised filters for each subsidiary. This function should soon be offered to all our clients.
We also make it mandatory to develop APIs for internal processes, which are not directly visible to the client, as this significantly reduces development times. API logic represents significant time savings for technical teams and employees, as they allow the code to be reused (more than half of APIs are used at least twice). As a result, the teams can deliver much faster and more efficiently.
By simplifying the development of new services and sharing information, while respecting the bank's specific security constraints, facilitating the interconnection between services and separating the data layers from the user experience, APIs promote flexibility and innovation for the benefit of clients.
