Working Group

Terminology

In the present context, the term Common API Specifications stands for the shared recommendations of APIs for financial institutions (FI), i.e. for banks and insurances.

These standard recommendations may be implemented by any interested party. It does not stand for functionalities that may be used for free, nor does it reflect a concession or commitment by any involved FI even to provide it.

Foundation

On May 4, 2016, the SFTI board members decided to address the topic open API by founding a dedicated work group.

Mandate

The mandate assigned to this work group is the creation of Common API specifications as foundation for future API implementations in the Swiss financial sector.

Participants

The majority of members of the working group come from SFTI member companies, but in principle the working group is open to anyone who has a sufficiently concrete connection to the financial center and is interested in participating.

Cooperation with this working group is therefore not limited to SFTI member companies, even if it is desirable that external employees also join our association sooner or later.

Working Mode

Based on the feedbacks to corresponding surveys, the working mode of the SFTI's work group is set to a 3 level involvement model: Core teams will be involved in the project's tasks constantly as dedicated stream teams, a second group will participate selectively, and the remaining group will stay in the information loop.

All three groups have an equal say in decision-making processes.

External Liaisons

The Common API work group maintains regular contacts to the Swiss Association for Swift & Financial Standards (SASFS). On the startup side, a non-periodic informative exchange is held together with Swiss Fintech.

Vision

The vision of the Common API work group is twofold:

• Create a common standard meaning that all Swiss FIs are committed to a single API standard.

• Support independent implementations meaning that each provider is free to implement the API with appropriate means, as long as the result is fully compliant with the API spec.

Targets

Primary targets of establishing the Common API specifications are the simplification and the speed-up of processes with reference to digitalisation. This applies to the assignment of different IT systems at the same company as well as between IT systems of different companies, and in particular with regard to the implementation of new processes.

Primary Objectives

The primary objectives of the Common API specifications are on the one hand, to simplify existing digital processes and to accelerate the implementation of new digitization processes. On the other hand, the open API implementation is intended also to be used FI-internal (cross-system) as well as between partners (B2B).

These objectives shall help to emerge an ecosystem to foster the creation and proliferation of innovations in the fields of finance.

Specification Development

The Common API specifications will be developed incrementally, i.e. business domain by business domain.

Specification Documentation

The Common API specifications shall documented by the use of up-to-date technologies to ease its use by software developers. Therefore, the complete documentation of the API specification will be available electronically. The hosting of any written documentation will be done at this GitHub site. The API specs themselves will also be published at GitHub. Current format is Open API 3.0 (a.k.a. Swagger).

Specification Implementation

For interaction scenarios (i.e. b2c), the interface architecture of the Common APIs shall be based on representational state transfer (REST). This decision is motivated by the aim for fast performance, reliability and the ability to scale, against the background of a state-of-the-art approach with a future-proofed perspective.

For integration scenarios (b2b), the interface architecture shall be geared to proven models as well. It is up to the decision of the spec team to decide on this topic.

Specification License

Any API spec published or hosted by SFTI is shared under the Apache 2.0 license.

Certification

To assure the compliance of an implementation of the Common API specifications, at least a best practice documentation might be provided. More preferably, a certification process shall be put in place. It is up to the decision of the stream team which institution this responsible for this process. Possible candidates are SASFS or SFTI, just to name a few.

Usage

It is at the discretion of the FI which runs a solution that incorporates the Common API specification to fully control whether to use it or not.

Furthermore, each FI using this API has the sole right to decide whether or not to monetize its usage.

Revenues always go to the FI.