Major banks are getting increasingly comfortable with the idea of open banking.
For Citi, the open banking initiative was marked by the launch of its global developer hub in November of last year. The hub was initially supported in three countries – the U.S., Singapore, and Australia – but has quickly spread to five more countries, with Latin America in the pipeline for 2017, Abhijit Bhattacharya, head of application services at Citi Fintech, said during the Findevr conference on Wednesday.
“What open banking means to us at Citi, is that by externalizing Citi APIs, and providing access to Citi financial systems, we are creating the opportunity to accelerate the development of global business partnerships,” he said. “We want to work with our business partners to create compelling applications for their customers who have Citi accounts, and then create seamless integration between those apps.”
Currently, the available Citi APIs are split into seven different categories, including money transfers, account authorization, and account management. To illustrate how developers can make use of the “authorize” and “account” API categories, Bhattacharya demoed a personal finance management app, which he named Can I Spend.
“It only took me a few hours to create the underlying frameworks, and hook it up to Citi APIs,” he said. “It took a little longer to generate images and what not, but this is absolutely something you can create in a short amount of time.”
Check out the demo below:
.@Citi #fintech showcasing "ultra personalized" PFM app created via Citi #developer hub #findevr pic.twitter.com/fo19H2qhUB
— Bank Innovation (@BankInnovation) March 22, 2017
Currently, Citi APIs are in a “sandbox” environment, Bhattacharya said. “This idea of a developer hub in a sandbox is made as an experimentation platform, we want to soak this a little bit, have a few more months spent on this, and then make a decision whether to go live and actually have application users access the Citi production environment directly,” he explained. “That’s something we are thinking about, but not something we are doing now.”