In a financial world driven by data, delivery is critical. Ahead of next week’s RegTech showcase at A-Team Group’s RegTech Summit for Capital Markets in New York, we talked to Patrick Poulin, CEO of regtech API Fortress about the company’s views on application programming interfaces (APIs) and its platform for API testing automation.
Q: What does RegTech mean to you?
A: It means finding ways to facilitate and automate the way we satisfy strict regulations. While sometimes overbearing, regulations are a necessity in an increasingly fast and complex tech ecosystem. So, we should be leveraging the power of computers for a lot of that work.
Q: What problem do financial institution have that you believe you can solve?
A: Financial institutions are all about data, which travels by application programming interfaces (APIs). The data is time sensitive and has to be accurate. Unfortunately, APIs are minimally tested and monitored today. We built API Fortress specifically to quickly catch institutions up and make sure their data is coming in quickly and accurately.
Q: Why do they have this problem?
A: Testing a new technology always lags behind building it. It can often take years before a company finds the time to dedicate time to solving the data problem. Until API Fortress, this required a huge amount of manual work from developers and quality assurers. With our platform, anyone can do the work in minutes.
Q: What regulations are of primary concern to you and your customers?
A: The EU revised payments directive, PSD2, is a big one for us, as the transfer of personal data means you run the risk of releasing data that may not supposed to be exposed.
Q: How do you solve the problem?
A: Our platform analyses entire payloads and makes sure the data is in the right format and accurate. It only sends the information that it was supposed to.
Q: What technology do you use?
A: Our platform is built in JAVA and Groovy, making it very compatible with any system out there.
Q: How do you fit into a financial institution’s architecture and data flows?
A: Our platform can either be in the cloud or within your environment on-premise. It can satisfy any security requirements you may have.
Q: Why are you taking part in the A-Team RegTech Summit for Capital Markets event?
A: API quality is a huge, underreported problem. The RegTech Summit gives us the ability to help make more people aware that the APIs that are critical to their platforms could be costing them millions of dollars.
Q: What type of people are you hoping to meet at the Summit?
A: Anyone in charge of data quality (strategists or architects), IT people, platform developers and quality assurers.
