apidays LIVE New York 2021 - API-driven Regulations for Finance, Insurance, and Healthcare
July 28 & 29, 2021
API Economy in Financial Services
Giovanni Lesna, Enterprise Lead & Partnerships at API3
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Agenda
1. Hype, Benefits and Risks of the API Economy
2. Open Financial Services
• Open Finance
• Open Banking
• Open Insurance
• Healthcare & APIs
3. OBP Project & API3 – Connectors of API Economy
4. Q&A (Please post Questions in the chat)
10 Min
5 Min
10 Min
4. Hype in the API Economy?
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Why the Hype? Gartner Hype Cycle – Slope of enlightenment
1. More instances of how the technology can benefit the
enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely
understood
2. Salesforce.com shelled out $6.5 billion for MuleSoft.
3. Visa agreed to pay $5.3 billion for Plaid .
4. Google acquiring Apigee for $625 million
5. Kong raised $100 million at a $1.4 billion valuation
6. Just look at the Uber app.
7. McDonalds + UberEats
5. What is the API Economy?
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APIs enable companies ease in building products and
services that would take too long to build – “Plug-and-
Play” the basis of the tech
1. APIs are customer facing, customizable software
interfaces that enable once separate software
components to effectively communicate by
overcoming the inherent incompatibilities created by
differing software platforms.
2. Think… Lego blocks
3. Multitude of Connected Microservices > creating an
Application
Source:APJ Cloud 100 (2015)
7. Benefits of using APIs
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Benefits & drivers
1. COVID-19 and Digital Transformation
2. Ecosystem economics & economies of scope
3. Improved customer experience
4. Continuous innovation
5. Increased efficiency: focus on making their digital
assets readily accessible. Easier for all participants to
develop unique products, services and functionality
quickly and with less cost.
6. Fast delivery: having open, modern industry-accepted
development tools = faster to build and bring products
to market and new opportunities for revenue more
quickly.
Risks
1. Data breach: Data misuse and abuse by criminals
wishing to take advantage of weak API security
2. Data hostage: Power held by “aggregator” firms. Once
they aggregate a critical mass of global digital users,
monopoly position to dictate the terms of data access
and API usage.
8. Open Finance
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Open banking (OB) and insurance is a subset of open
finance
1. An extension of OB data-sharing principles to
enable third party providers to access customers'
data across a broader range of financial sectors
and products, including savings and investments
2. Decentralized Finance (DeFi & Web3.0)
3. Centralized Finance (CeFi & Web 2.0)
4. Cross sector & Ecosystem focus
9. Open Banking
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Open banking mandates or encourages financial
institutions to allow authorised third parties access:
1. To individual and business customer data
(e.g. account information).
2. To financial services (such as payment initiation).
3. Following customer consent.
4. In a machine-readable format (API).
5. Established by regulators or from market demand.
6. PSD2 (Second Payment Services Directive)
7. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) &
other Global Privacy Regulations
10. Open Insurance
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The Open Insurance movement is growing but not mandate
as of yet. This would follow in the success of open banking
footsteps:
1. Allow consumers to access and share their data with
other insurers or third parties, in a safe, agile, accurate
and convenient way
2. Interoperability & Integration
3. Placing the customer at the heart of the business and
processes
4. Creating new use-cases that would not be possible.
Parametric insurance, integration with 3rd party service
providers e.g. medical practitioners, auto repairs).
5. Insurance-as-a-service (IaaS) – micro-insurance
6. Some equivalent of PSD2 & GDPR
Some nations pursuing this through public consultations
1. SUSEP (Brazil) , Superintendence of Private
Insurance- Just published guidelines & standards
2. EIOPA (EU) , European Insurance and
Occupational Pension Authority (EIOPA) /
European Commission’s Digital Finance Strategy
3. Open Insurance Initiative (Italy), Italy Working
group – API Playground
Willis Towers Watson estimates 67% of insurers will
modify business models by 2025.
1. AIA’s partnership with WeDoctor (110 million users)
– win-win- Medical Insurance
2. ‘InsureMyTesla’ - uunderwritten by AXA to simplify
car insurance
3. Ping An + Samsung with Samsung’s digital health
capabilities, such as heart rate sensing smart
watches.
4. Nationwide & RiskStream exploring interesting use-
11. Healthcare and APIs
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Enable better access to health information for patients,
improve interoperability and unleash innovation:
1. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) put
together rules that give healthcare consumers access to
their personal data.
2. The CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services )
rule targeting U.S. healthcare organizations.
3. Improve Interoperability & Integration at the core digital
healthcare system (FHIR R4 standards).
4. Health insurance companies expose clinical and claims
data of patients as FHIR compliant APIs to the patients
themselves, or to third-party systems that the patient
selects.
5. HIPAA Compliance & GDPR.
Industry APIs
1. EHR (Electronic Health Record) APIs,
2. Consolidated APIs to access patient data,
3. Clinical data management and analytics APIs,
4. Public health content APIs,
5. Drug data and drug interaction checking APIs,
6. Symptom checker APIs. and
7. Telehealth APIs.
Implications
1. Patient has portable health data,
2. Provide data for custom gene or medical therapy,
3. Patients decide and are remunerated for their
health data,
4. E.g. users connect iWatch data for lower medical
insurance premiums (Discovery Insure).
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▵ Open Bank Project is the leading open source Open
Banking solution.
▵ Standard Catalogue of 400+ APIs covering several
standards.
▵ Vibrant global developer and partner community of
11k+
▵ Berlin and UK based consulting and software engineering
business.
▵ Started Open Bank Project in 2010.
▵ Inspired UK Open Banking, Berlin Group, Australian CDR,
& recently Mexico Open Finance.
OBP Customers
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OBP works with many of the world’s
largest financial institutions
60+ FI Customers 11K+ Developers Regulators 20+ Partners ~
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▵ Since 2018, API3 predecessor worked on connecting APIs
to Web 3.0. Limitations drove us to innovate.
▵ API3 is DAO-governed.
▵ Integrations to multiple EVM compatible chains, inc.
Ethereum, Polygon, Fantom, Harmony, Plasm,
TomoChain, Conflux.
▵ Investors inc. Digital Currency Group, Placeholder,
Pantera, CoinFund, Accomplice, Hashed.
▵ API3 + OBP enter into a 10 year partnership to bridge OB
APIs to Web 3.0.
API3 Investors
API3 Partners
15. API3 Overview
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API3’s mission is to make APIs fully
compatible to Web 3.0
▵ APIs are the glue to the internet. Salesforce, Ebay, FB,
Google, Expedia, Uber, Airbnb are powered by APIs.
▵ Web 3.0 must be able to access the kind of services that Web
APIs offer in order to interact with the real world.
▵ Connecting APIs directly to Web 3.0 will create new dAPPs
and digital agreements, expanding the markets for
decentralized networks.
16. The API Connectivity Problem
▵ Due to the way blockchains internal mechanisms achieve
consensus, blockchain applications cannot natively connect to
external data.
▵ Current connection solutions depend on middlemen
○ API providers require expert management to connect
to Web 3.0, which is not scalable.
○ Many API providers hire third party companies that
deliver and re-sell the data for them.
■ API providers risk GDPR breaches, spillage,
and unauthorized data resell.
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The API Connectivity Problem
▵ Previous solutions focus: how can blockchains as
technology connect to APIs.
▵ API3 focus: how can APIs as a technology connect to
blockchains.
▵ Data sharing happens through APIs. All APIs have
adapters and standards to share such data.
▵ No uniform standard API adapter exists for APIs
connecting Web 2.0 data to Web 3.0.
18. Airnode — An API Gateway
to Web 3.0
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▵ Airnode is a simple to use, open source API gateway that
allows APIs to directly connect to Web 3.0, without active
management or the use of third parties.
○ Quick set up (minutes)
○ Set-and-forget (maintenance free)
○ Free for API providers to deploy
▵ Airnode allows the API provider to retain full control of their
data, allowing them to be fully GDPR compliant when
transacting in Web 3.0 environments.
▵ API3 & OBP will provide 400 OB APIs to Web 3.0.
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Tap into external APIs from other financial services providers to use financial data and
create innovative applications and new business models.
Insurance
dApps
Pension Funds
Bank account information Payment
Initiation
Open Finance Data For Web 3.0
Open Banking APIs Enable:
○ Read Account Information.
○ Payment Initiation.
○ Banking-as-a-Service.
○ Banking-as-a-Platform.
○ Account Aggregation - Credit Scoring
○ Insurance, stocks, and pensions
○ DeFI<>TradFi
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Web 3.0 Services
Platforms
API Layer
Open Finance Data
Core Banking
Airnode Connected with Open Bank Project APIs
Accounts Payments KYC/AML Branches/Products Metadata API Metrics & Docs
Web 3.0 Connections
Self-sovereign
Identities
CBDCs Wallet
aggregation
DeFi Parametric
Insurance
Blockchain
Banking Services
21. Partnership For End-
to-End Open-Source,
Open Banking on Web
3.0
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Open Insurance being
explored for Web 3.0
and beyond
The largest application (app) companies of our generations are APIs at their core.
Question becomes: how do we get data onto the blockchain.
Question becomes: how do we get data onto the blockchain. To understand that we have to understand how the blockchain works. What standards is being used to share data so we don’t re-create the wheel
Kleros
Curve Labs
DAOstack
ChainAPI
Emurgo
dlab
etc… (will provide these asap)