Editor’s note: Today we hear from Jon White and Angela Donohoe from BPAY Group. BPAY Group is best known for BPAY, the leading electronic bill payment system in Australia, handling one-third of the market. Learn how BPAY Group is positioning the organization for the future by using APIs to streamline workflows for existing customers and new businesses.

BPAY has been a leader in the bill payment industry in Australia for 22 years and provides a secure, fast, and convenient way to connect individuals, businesses, and banks to help people stay on top of their bills.

One of the reasons that BPAY is the preferred bill payment service for so many Australians is our commitment to human-centered design. We’re continuously talking with customers and looking at ways that we can deliver better experiences, products, and services, such as peer-to-peer payments. During these conversations, we noticed some ways that our processes were causing friction for existing or potential customers.

For example, we traditionally used a batch processing system to handle requests between billing companies and banks. But that could cause headaches for some customers, as an error in even one request could cause the whole batch to be rejected. Plus, many “neobanks” (new types of digital-only banks) wanted to work with real-time transactions instead of batch processes, which take longer to complete.

We realized that APIs had the potential to solve many of the challenges impacting customers while opening the doors for future product and business development. We developed a few customer-facing APIs and tested them in closed betas. This experiment went far better than we expected, and we realized that there was a huge appetite for APIs among our biller customers.

While we had developed many APIs for internal systems, developing APIs that were easy to consume by our customers was a new challenge. We needed to move away from our home-grown API development approach and make our API environment more powerful, versatile, and easier to use. The API experts at The Singularity worked with us to develop a strong API strategy. We decided that we would need to support our new strategy with a scalable API management platform.

After a rigorous search, we landed on the Apigee API Management Platform. Apigee was the only solution that met all our technology and business requirements. With Apigee, we have a solid foundation for APIs that will help us deliver more value for all customers.

Creating a custom development environment

BPAY is a trusted brand in Australia, so it was very important to us that we maintain our reputation for excellent customer experiences. When setting up our developer portal, we started with a closed pilot and used developer feedback to make the portal as convenient and simple to use as possible. The Apigee developer portal has many built-in features to help us customize experiences, and if we run into roadblocks, the Apigee team at Google listens and helps us create the custom experience we want.

The developer portal has already proven to be extremely popular. In its first month live, we registered 104 developers in the sandbox environment and 10 developers in the production environment. That was before we even started marketing our developer portal, so we expect those numbers to rise quickly.

Breaking new ground with APIs

We’ve already released four foundational APIs, with a goal of eventually releasing dozens. Our APIs are helping us create smoother experiences for customers. We mentioned that when processing a batch of payment files, one mistake could cause the entire batch to get rejected. Our APIs now enable businesses to validate all payment information before submitting a batch file, dramatically reducing the chances of errors. They can even use our APIs to automatically generate batch files in the right format for different banks.

While APIs improve service for current customers, they also open the doors for new areas of business. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) services, which enable customers to spread out payments across weeks or months, are already popular in retail spaces. After releasing our first APIs, we connected with two BNPL billing services. These companies use our APIs to validate customers’ bill payment information and then pay the bill in full on behalf of customers. This was a completely new use case for us, one that could not have been implemented without our APIs.

The payment service NoahPay also adopted our APIs to validate payment information and let customers pay bills using funds from their WeChat accounts. This is an exciting new market for us, as it’s one of the first examples of how we can connect to international digital wallets through our new APIs. It’s also a great way to introduce users of WeChat, a messaging app used by more than 1 billion people in China, to the BPAY brand.

Planning for the future of bill pay

We have big plans for APIs in the future, and Apigee helps make these plans a reality. We plan to establish a generous freemium monetization model that will allow customers to make up to 200,000 API calls for free each month with tiered payment plans above that. This will enable us to open the doors for smaller organizations while providing optimal support for larger businesses and banks that might need to make millions of calls. Having powerful end-to-end monetization features built in to Apigee means that we can process monetized transactions with ease.

Built-in reporting functionality will also help us make sure that we’re understanding the market’s need for APIs and always providing our customers with valuable services and support.

Apigee greatly streamlines creating self-service API environments. Even as we grow our business, our internal teams will be able to continue providing excellent customer service without needing extra staff to answer questions, help with integration support, and constantly check API security. APIs are the way of the future, and Apigee prepares us meet the challenges that come along with it.

Kubernetes made a splash when it brought containerized app management to the world a few years back. Now, many of us are using it in production to deploy and manage apps at scale. Along the way, we’ve gathered tips and best practices on using Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to your best advantage. Here are some of the most popular posts on our site about deploying and using Kubernetes. 

1. Use Kubernetes Namespaces for easier resource management. Simple tasks get more complicated as you build services on Kubernetes. Using Namespaces, a sort of virtual cluster, can help with organization, security, and performance. This post shares tips on which Namespaces to use (and not to use), how to set them up, view them, and create resources within a Namespace. You’ll also see how to manage Namespaces easily and let them communicate.
2. Use readiness and liveness probes for health checks. Managing large, distributed systems can be complicated, especially when something goes wrong. Kubernetes health checks are an easy way to make sure app instances are working. Creating custom health checks lets you tailor them to your environment. This blog post walks you through how and when to use readiness and liveness probes.
3. Keep control of your deployment with requests and limits. There’s a lot to love about the scalability of Kubernetes. However, you do still have to keep an eye on resources to make sure containers have enough to actually run. It’s easy for teams to spin up more replicas than they need or make a configuration change that affects CPU and memory. Learn more in this post about using requests and limits to stay firmly in charge of your Kubernetes resources.  
4. Discover services running outside the cluster. There are probably services living outside your Kubernetes cluster that you’ll want to access regularly. And there are a few different ways to connect to these services, like external service endpoints or ConfigMaps. Those have some downsides, though, so in this blog post you’ll learn how best to use the built-in service discovery mechanisms for external services, just like you do for internal services.
5. Decide whether to run databases on Kubernetes. Speaking of external services: there are a lot of considerations when you’re thinking about running databases on Kubernetes. It can make life easier to use the same tools for databases and apps, and get the same benefits of repeatability and rapid spin-up. This post explains which databases are best run on Kubernetes, and how to get started when you decide to deploy.
6. Understand Kubernetes termination practices. All good things have to come to an end, even Kubernetes containers. The key to Kubernetes terminations, though, is that your application can handle them gracefully. This post walks through the steps of Kubernetes terminations and what you need to know to avoid any excessive downtime.

For even more on using GKE, check out our latest Containers and Kubernetes blog posts.

Financing digital transformation poses a significant problem for many enterprises we work with. It’s not because the C-suite doesn’t support it: the need to become more agile, digital, and data-driven is nearly ubiquitous in executive public pronouncements. But most large organizations look at IT investment in a way that’s ineffective for a successful digital transformation effort.  

A varied combination of  factors affect an organization’s success in the digital ecosystem, and a lack of alignment between IT and business leaders can hamper even the most digitally sophisticated organizations. Empirical research by the Apigee Institute shows clear evidence that a solid digital transformation effort, aligned across business and marketing, whose progress is carefully tied to core enterprise metrics, must be supported by an investment strategy that uses a “real options” portfolio approach.

Let’s explore ways to think about funding digital transformation.

Planning for the Unimaginable

Common IT investment strategies are focused on straight-line net present value (NPV) business case calculations, which emphasize linear solutions and impacts. These methods ignore the value of enabling a range of options and potential future use cases, which an API program, with its reusable, highly consumable digital assets, makes available for the enterprise. In addition, these methods often ignore the value of the new categories of business data generated by such programs, as well as business capabilities that were impossible to imagine before the capabilities came online.

One media company we’re working with was astounded by a project that now makes key sales provisioning available to large distribution partners within two months, when previous estimates predicted two years and many millions of dollars, each.

More importantly, that functionality will now be reused across all of their numerous current partners and sales channels, and is enabling exciting new partnerships that were too costly before. This functionality was an unexpected by-product of their original API effort—it wasn’t even the main focus of the initial project.  

There was no way that the impact of this capability or its implications on new business could have been predicted at the outset, and no way to formally model the outsized impact this functionality will have on the enterprise. Any attempts to do so would have been deemed ludicrous.

Breaking from the Status Quo

So how do you fund an API-driven digital transformation, which by nature emphasizes speed and optionality to unlock new ways of doing business, instead of the business-as-usual single-use, point-to-point integrations that perpetuate status quo thinking? For a world where the latter is the dominant paradigm and you don’t have a clear C-level mandate, here are three suggestions.

1.  Enable your web/e-commerce teams. Many such teams find their responsibilities expanded to include mobile, kiosk, and many other digital initiatives, while being trapped in the traditional web server, do-it-yourself paradigm. These teams are actually quite open to technology, and often harbour weekend hackers who love to explore the new capabilities that are expanding the digital ecosystem at light speed. Tapping this passion by funding new approaches and quickly realizing immediate projects can create first the technical, and then the business proof points that resonate with a strategy team. These capabilities must be nurtured to move out of the lab into production, where real results are created.  

2. Focus on partnerships. Opening and accelerating  your relationships with partners via APIs (read more about partner API initiatives here) is high-impact and relatively easy to model. This business area can prove out an API platform, and in our experience creates clear business value that can support future justifications for other business units. What’s best about these wins is that sales operations groups are typically very tactical and demanding, so when they see the value, these groups will send a message to the rest of the organization that APIs have business value. Further, your enterprise’s core partnerships have the focus of executive attention. Adding value here will elevate the stature of the API program in the C-suite.

3. Work on your CFO/financial organization. Using your successes in e-commerce and partnerships, you can propose a more robust investment using a real options approach that leads to treatment of APIs as products. This path is predicated on what research has proven to work: the adoption of a digital KPI target, coupled with a portfolio of programs whose net result is to achieve the target KPI.  

Building Toward the Big Vision

But what about the visions of ground-breaking business models, ubiquitous connectivity, and enablement of an ever-shifting set of opportunities on big platforms and with unlimited partnership possibilities? Yes, these are still the endpoints to work toward, and fundamentally comprise the strategic reasons to embark on a digital transformation. If your enterprise has the C-Level leadership (in the form of a CDO or CDO-like figure), supported by a well-funded, sophisticated investment approach, by all means, build that new world now.

However, should that vision be shared only within your business unit, a forward-thinking IT group, or a dedicated innovation team, the most important thing to do is to build your team’s capability—and your program’s credibility—while delivering value along the way. The approach we suggest here has been proven in many of the organizations we work with; once your organization begins working faster and at lower costs by orders of magnitude, you’ll have created enough leverage to change the way your organization invests in its API program.