British banking group, Metro Bank, announced on Friday the launch its new developer portal, which opens up the bank’s platform to FCA-registered third parties that are wishing to build services on top of its APIs.
According to Metro, the self-service portal was built in collaboration with Google’s Apigee team, allows access to the bank’s PSD2 API documentation and sandbox. It also provides a “frictionless” way to integrate with the bank. Metro noted that developers will also be able to access the API documentation and set out simple API queries that return sample data.
While sharing more details about the developer portal, Craig Donaldson, CEO at Metro Bank stated:
“PSD2 has the power to shake up UK banking and inject more competition and choice into the market. By working with market-leading Apigee API management, our developer portal will provide third parties with the building blocks they need to develop even more products and services to help make customers’ lives easier. I’m excited to see how APIs are leveraged; I genuinely think it will be transformational.”
Denis Dorval, Google’s Head of Apigee for EMEA, also commented:
“We see the changing preferences for how consumers want to interact with their banks as an opportunity for the banking industry to reach a whole new generation of customer and build a long-lasting, dynamic relationship with them. It’s exciting to see a leading and innovative bank such as Metro Bank embrace a new approach that can provide ease of use and ultimately deliver the same seamless connected customer experience that they currently have in other parts of their daily lives.”
The bank added it launched its Account Information Service (AIS) and plans to unveil further APIs, including a Payment Initiation Service (PIS), in the near future.