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Finance

Enhancing a Financial Institution's API Management and Security

Focus Areas

Security

Digital Transformation

API Management

Business Problem

A leading financial institution was struggling to securely manage its API infrastructure. The firm handled more than 5 billion API calls every month for transactions, customer onboarding, and sharing data with third-party financial service providers, but they lacked a centralized API governance framework. This resulted in inefficiencies in API orchestration, exposed it to potential security attacks, and increased operating costs.

Key challenges:

  • Lack of API Governance: It was difficult to apply best practices and standards for API lifecycle management without a structured governance framework. This led to inconsistent API documentation, unmonitored endpoints, poor security protocols, slow development cycles, and operational issues.
  • Security Risks: Lack of security controls and real time monitoring of API usage left the firm vulnerable to data breaches, unauthorized access, and Distributed Denial of Service attacks.
  • Scalability: The infrastructure could not scale with the growing user base and API call volume. This resulted in higher response times, reduced API performance, and the inability to offer reliable services to customers.
  • API Data Integration: The lack of data integration between internal and third-party systems and challenges with information synchronization between services and records exposed them to risks of data integrity and compliance as per industry regulations.
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The Approach

Working closely with the client’s IT, security, and operations team, our consultants decided to design and implement a comprehensive governance framework by leveraging industry-standard technologies and frameworks such as Python, Java, Groovy, PostgreSQL, and GraphQL Composer along with AWS cloud-native services to reduce operational inefficiencies, improve security, and enable scalability.

Key components of the solution:

  1. Discovery and requirements gathering: Following an in-depth assessment of the client’s existing API infrastructure and security practices (including stakeholder interviews, a detailed review of API logs and documentation, and an evaluation of existing API management tools), the following key challenges and objectives were identified:

    • A standardized API governance framework needed to be created to manage API development and deployment.

    • API security needed to be improved through the implementation of role-based access control, monitoring, and encryption mechanisms.

    • Enhance scalability to handle the increasing volume of API calls.

    • Streamline data integration between APIs and the institution’s core systems.

  2. Design and implementation of the API Governance Framework: The team implemented a centralized API governance framework using a combination of Python, Java, and Groovy to enforce coding standards, versioning policies, and security protocols across all APIs.

    • API Lifecycle Management: GraphQL Composer was utilized to manage the entire lifecycle of APIs. The framework implemented version control, standardized documentation, and automated testing to ensure consistency and quality across all API services.

    • Data Management: PostgreSQL, with its ability to handle high-volume transactions in real time, was implemented to seamlessly integrate the APIs and the backend systems. 

    • API Records: Automated tools were deployed to ensure all APIs were properly documented and versioned, allowing the client’s internal teams to maintain clear records of the functionality, usage limits, and deployment history of each API. 

  3. API Security: Our security experts also put in place security enhancements to safeguard APIs against unauthorized access, data breaches, and DDoS attacks.

    • Secure Access: To enforce role-based access control across APIs, and ensure that only authorized users and systems could access sensitive data or perform critical actions, OAuth 2.0 was implemented for secure authorization and JWT for token-based authentication.

    • Real-Time API Traffic Monitoring: AWS CloudWatch and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) were integrated to monitor API traffic in real time and detect suspicious activity. WAF was configured to block dangerous traffic, while CloudWatch alerted on potential security incidents.

    • Data Encryption: All data in transit was encoded using Transport Layer Security (TLS) to secure the communication between APIs and clients. AWS Key Management Service (KMS) was further used to manage encryption keys for sensitive data stored in PostgreSQL and S3 buckets.

  4. API Scalability and Performance: Our consultants optimized the infrastructure for scalability and performance to handle the swiftly increasing volume of API calls.

    • Scalability: To improve resource usage and reduce operational costs, AWS Auto Scaling was configured to dynamically adjust compute resources. 

    • Caching: Redis was implemented as an in-memory cache for frequently requested data. This reduced the load on PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch, improved API response times and the overall API performance, and reduced latency for end users.

    • Overloading and fair usage: API rate limiting – a mechanism that would restrict the number of API calls that could be made by individual users or systems within a specified timeframe – was introduced to ensure fair usage and prevent overwhelming the backend infrastructure by high-volume requests.

  5. Streamlining data integration: Curate’s consultants constructed a strong data pipeline to enable smooth data synchronization between internal and external systems.

    • Data Synchronization: An Extract, Transform, Load pipeline was designed to automate the extraction of data from internal systems, transform the data to meet requirements, and load it into the PostgreSQL database, giving APIs access to updated, accurate, and real time data.

    • Third-party APIs: GraphQL was used to enable smooth API-to-API communication. It allowed for more efficient querying of data, reduced the number of API calls required to retrieve necessary data, and streamlined data sharing with external financial service providers.

  6. Training and Change Management: Curate’s consultants provided a detailed change management plan, documentation, and training to the client’s internal teams so they could manage the new API governance framework and security protocols. The training included:

    • Best practices for API design, deployment, and security.

    • Using the new API governance framework for managing API lifecycles.

    • Techniques for monitoring and optimizing API performance using AWS tools.

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Business Outcomes

The transition from Waterfall to Agile, led by Curate Consulting, resulted in transformative improvements for the healthcare provider:

Enhanced API Security


The number of security incidents related to API vulnerabilities was reduced by 50% with the integration of OAuth 2.0, JWT, and AWS WAF.

Increased Scalability


The infrastructure supported a 40% increase in API call volume without performance degradation with AWS Auto Scaling.

Reduced Operational Costs


Operating expenses were reduced by 25% through infrastructure optimization and automation of key processes, particularly in API infrastructure management and manual security monitoring.

Sample KPIs

Here’s a quick summary of the kinds of KPI’s and goals teams were working towards**:

Metric Before After Improvement
API response time 500 ms 350 ms 30% improvement
API security incidents 10/month 5/month 50% reduction
API call volume 5 billion 7 billion 40% increase
API infrastructure costs $1 million/year $750,000/year 25% reduction
Data synchronization errors 50/month 10/month 80% reduction
**Disclaimer: The set of KPI’s are for illustration only and do not reference any specific client data or actual results – they have been modified and anonymized to protect confidentiality and avoid disclosing client data.

Customer Value

Curate Consulting’s expertise in Agile methodologies not only improved operational efficiency but also enhanced the healthcare provider’s ability to serve their patients more effectively:

Improved Services to Customers and Partners


The institution saw a 30% improvement in API response times, ensuring faster access to services for customers and partners, by implementing caching and rate limiting.

Data Access for Third-Party Providers


The new data pipeline and GraphQL integration simplified the data synchronization process, reducing errors in financial reporting and improving the accuracy of data accessed by third-party providers.

Conclusion

Curate’s consultants assisted the financial institution in resolving issues related to scalability, security, and API administration by helping the client manage increased API volumes, speed up response times, and improve data security. This was done by automating security controls, optimizing infrastructure with AWS services, and putting in place a centralized framework for API governance. Along with lowering operating expenses, the solution increased the API infrastructure’s scalability and dependability, adding substantial business value and boosting their customers’ confidence.

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