How a fintech with $123B of assets powers modern financial experiences through Speakeasy

How a fintech with $123B of assets powers modern financial experiences through Speakeasy

Apex Fintech Solutions (opens in a new tab) offers a range of services for the fintech industry, trusted by companies like Ally (traded on NYSE), SoFi, and many more. With $123B+ in assets under custody, they enable modern investing and wealth management tools through frictionless platforms, APIs, and other services.

APIs Power Successful Fintechs

APIs play a crucial role for Apex and any modern financial institution.

Financial institutions have historically relied on outdated practices to deliver consumer experiences, such as wet signatures for authorization, cumbersome batch processing of transactions, and error-prone manual data entry. These practices led to high cost-to-serve, long transaction processing times, and reduced customer satisfaction.

By offering services via APIs, Apex empowers its financial services customers to eliminate these inefficiencies, reduce costs, and accelerate transaction speed. Thanks to these APIs, companies like eToro can offer compelling consumer experiences like real-time $0 commission trades.

Challenges Apex Wanted to Solve

Due to the critical importance of APIs for Apex’s business, a fast and seamless integration experience is essential.

The Apex team identified numerous ways that Speakeasy could help:

• Streamline integrations and save time for their customers: Apex noticed that about ~30% of each customer’s integration code was the same, and had to be unnecessarily re-written from scratch by every customer. By providing this code out-of-the-box in a client SDK, Apex realized they could help customers get to a live integration faster while significantly reducing the potential for coding bugs.
• Ensure stability of services: Placing the burden of writing the entire integration on the customer alone exposes them to potential errors, such as forgetting to account for pagination, retries, error handling, or dealing with auth in an insecure manner. These issues can cause the integration to fail unexpectedly, which would reflect poorly on Apex. Handling these concerns in an SDK enabled Apex to better ensure that integrations are built optimally and reliably, ultimately leading to improved customer satisfaction and reduced support costs.
• Easily handle breaking change mitigation: As their APIs evolve, Apex wanted to offer customers a better way to update their integrations.

Speakeasy SDKs Enable API Integration Excellence

The team chose the Speakeasy platform to generate SDKs that would allow them to achieve these goals and provide integration guidance to their customers. Instead of expecting the customers to build the integration on their own, in their own way, with potential errors, Apex empowers them with all the necessary tools to minimize the effort on the customer side.

"Customers always want good examples, good documentation, and best practices. An SDK provides a framework that enhances the user experience. For instance, it standardizes security, pagination, error handling, and object mapping from API responses. An SDK handles all these aspects for the developer, in their native language, ensuring consistency and ease of use."

Suresh Ramachandran, Director of Client Experiences at Apex Fintech Solutions

SDK benefits for Apex Fintech Solutions include:

• Accelerated time-to-market: With Speakeasy-generated SDKs, Apex's customers can integrate swiftly, unlocking revenue streams faster and enhancing Apex's competitive edge.
• Improved developer experience: By providing comprehensive developer documentation and SDKs, Apex enhances the integration experience, fostering stronger customer relationships. The improved robustness of the integration experience allows them to maintain high customer satisfaction.
• Cost-effectiveness: Apex considered building and maintaining SDKs in-house but quickly realized that they would have to hire a team of engineers to do this in every language. Partnering with Speakeasy offered Apex a cost-effective alternative while enabling them to offer high-quality, battle-tested SDKs – saving resources and minimizing overhead costs.

"Using a non-automated approach toward SDK generation would have been costly from an ongoing maintenance perspective. Automating our SDK production with Speakeasy allows us to cost-effectively cover our customers' language requirements and ease their integration cost quite a bit."

Suresh Ramachandran, Director of Client Experiences at Apex Fintech Solutions

Through strategic collaboration with Speakeasy, Apex Fintech Solutions has overcome integration hurdles, paving the way for enhanced customer experiences and accelerated growth. By empowering customers with user-friendly SDKs and comprehensive documentation, Apex reinforces its position as a leader in the fintech landscape, driving innovation and enabling seamless digital transformation.