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.

Tradier uses the Apigee API management platform from Google to abstract the legacy complexities of capital markets so that developers can build FinTech applications in an agile, nimble, and quick fashion at minimal cost. The company embodies the evolution of what cloud technology can enable in the form of an API-first business delivered as a service.

The rise of API-powered FinTech

Historically, companies that wanted to build systems, applications, or services to interact with the stock market would have to build an entire brokerage operation from scratch. This would include data infrastructure, compliance infrastructure, and storage capabilities. It could take years and massive capital expense to accomplish everything that was required to be ready to serve customers.

Tradier provides this infrastructure as an API-based service so that the same companies can launch investor applications in as little as a few weeks. This democratized access means that FinTech innovation can come from anywhere, giving the same opportunities to create new products to everyone, from enterprise customers to startups.

“Financial markets are becoming fundamentally decentralized and unbundled,” says Dan Raju, co-founder, CEO, and chairman at Tradier. “The services that large legacy banks and brokerage firms used to offer are being supplanted by Tradier’s microservices and APIs, which power innovation.”

More than 200 companies use Tradier to develop and launch new products, or to add new features and functions that they traditionally would not have offered in existing products. With a large and diverse user base, Tradier faced the challenge of managing its partners in way that helps ensure it can grant credentials, track, monitor, and report in an efficient and equitable manner.

At the same time, the company recognized the inherent value of its partners for their power to leverage Tradier APIs to innovate. Tradier’s fundamental market disruption is the partner ecosystem, where the company is engaged along with its partners to deliver value to the entire ecosystem in the form of new products and services.

Embracing an API-powered ecosystem

Tradier has moved beyond providing great APIs toward engaging its ecosystem. If a customer wants a specific dataset, the company doesn’t automatically build a new product. Instead, Tradier looks to the ecosystem to build the product. With this approach, Tradier has taken its capabilities and multiplied them by hundreds.

“The fundamental difference between thinking about an API ecosystem versus an API product is the difference between being a participant who’s enabling innovation and not just a company delivering a set of technical capabilities,” Raju says.

Tradier takes an outside-in approach toward engaging its API ecosystem. Constantly listening to participants and helping to enable and empower them to create value is fundamental to the company’s business model. Rather than simply focusing on building new capabilities on its own, Tradier listens to what functionalities customers need and facilitates development. In many cases, the ecosystem generates the requested product organically rather than Tradier needing to do it.

“I love APIs because they allow you to empower others to create value. The concept of empowering others to create value along with you is what is the most satisfying, and the most fascinating, thing about APIs,” says Raju.

Delivering value at scale

Tradier handles between 500 million to 1 billion API calls and a billion dollars in transactions a month, and all of them run through the Apigee API management platform. Apigee’s last mile forms the single layer that manages Tradier’s infrastructure, including security, analytics, developer interactions, and execution. The company also uses Apigee to comply with an array of regulatory reporting, mandated by Tradier’s status as a FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority)-regulated entity.

“Apigee is integral to the Tradier offering. They have been great partners and have always collaborated and enabled us to innovate at a pace that helped Tradier attract developers and innovative companies. We see tremendous potential in the synergy of Apigee and Google as it brings to the market a vast extended capability set based on the Google Cloud Platform.”

Tradier is an API-centric ecosystem that delivers value to an entire set of players where the nucleus is the Apigee API management suite, which helps deliver, innovate, publish, manage, monitor, and secure the ecosystem on a day-to-day basis. Simplicity combined with product evangelism is the key to success in the API space, Raju says.

Tradier’s capabilities to innovate, iterate, and travel the journey with its customers, partners, and developers has yielded many rewards. The company’s long history of working with Apigee has enabled it to assemble a set of people and resources for creating engagement, as well as to create a winning set of APIs for delivering FinTech capabilities.

Considering the transformative future

Looking toward a future in which the financial services industry will experience ongoing disruption, Raju predicts that Tradier will continue to leverage APIs to lead the way.

“I think traditional banks are under attack. They are being replaced by a set of nimble, agile players that are offering a lot of new functionality to customers. This is forcing banks to think about how they can digitize their products through APIs so that they can provide the same functionalities as newer players.”

With companies like Tradier and others offering functionality that used to be in-house and exposing it outside, traditional brokerage firms are also being forced to rethink their model. Raju believes that this line of thinking also extends to the Blockchain.

“Exposing Blockchain-like capabilities through APIs is going to be a disruptive influence, and it will be critical for companies to think about how APIs, and more importantly Blockchain, can create value for us.”

With 150 million users and counting, Picsart was originally founded as a photo and video editing app we use to enhance our everyday life before uploading them to various social media platforms. As its user numbers continue growing, the company began exploring options for incorporating its easy-to-use editing tools into other applications and services. Now, businesses looking for a low-lift solution to enhance their product offerings with Picsart’s award-winning software suite can do so. Thanks to Apigee, organizations from assorted markets, such as printers, t-shirt makers, and phone case designers, are benefiting from Picsart’s custom design APIs.

Picsart helps companies reach a new audience of customers by offering them graphic design capabilities at an affordable cost, avoiding the resource and time-intensive process of hiring developers and building these functions from scratch. The benefits of APIs are energizing Picsart’s business partners, too; with the addition of photo editing, keeping customers engaged, and returning to their apps.

“Eighty percent of our users are Generation Z and Millennials,” says Jinny Jung, vice-president of Picsart’s API program. “They’re the future of creators all over the globe. They want creative control.”

“Many of the businesses we serve are looking to tap into that audience. They really need solutions like this to take their business to the next level,” Jung adds. Having an API service also takes Picsart to the next level — thanks in part to Apigee.

How to turn a quick pivot

Moving from strictly business-to-consumer (B2C) services to a business-to-business (B2B) offering wasn’t easy for Picsart. The company had to adopt an entirely new business model and develop a new suite of API products — and they did so quickly. 

When a prominent social media site contacted Picsart about offering its editing tools to their users via APIs, Picsart knew it couldn’t miss this opportunity. However, none of their developers knew how to manage APIs for external use, an endeavor involving multiple processes and fraught with logistical complications. Failing to configure APIs correctly allows malicious actors to effortlessly bypass cybersecurity protections, exposing network data.

The company quickly assembled an API business unit to plan and coordinate the creation of a secure API development process. This process would support marketing, sales, distribution, and other facets of the business, all while still delivering great functionality to the company’s original B2C customers. And voila! Picsart was reborn. 

The API BU works as “a scrappy startup within a larger company,” as Jung puts it. Its budget is scrappy too. Among the unit’s first tasks: finding an API management platform that could simplify and streamline all the tasks the team faced at an affordable price. Jung says that Apigee was a clear choice.

“Apigee’s offerings gave us the flexibility to get off the ground without a huge budget and grow our business over time. It’s super easy to use, the dashboard is very intuitive, and the price came in well for us.”

The company had already used APIs internally, but had never provided them to customers or partners.  

“We needed to lean on gateways and management platforms that already knew how to set everything up,” Jung says. “We really needed the shortcut.”

Her team did consider other API platforms, but being part of Google Cloud gave Apigee a natural edge.

“We were already Google Cloud clients. We were already part of the Google Cloud ecosystem. We really liked Apigee’s ease of use and the power of Google behind it.”

Apigee works seamlessly in tandem with its other Google Cloud services, including the Google Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) and BigQuery, Google Cloud’s fully-managed data warehouse.

“Apigee’s integration with the whole Google ecosystem makes our lives easier, and makes it quite natural for us to use,” says Tiberiu Stanescu, director of engineering for the Picsart API business unit. “It allows us to also meet our technical needs, including scalability and even improved performance with queries and, when we’re integrating the data, dashboards.” 

Using Apigee for total API control

Picsart uses Apigee to manage all its external APIs, which include those that enable users to remove or change photo backgrounds, apply filters, and add text. Apigee also manages the API features for Picsart’s Editor SDK package.

Key ways in which Picsart uses Apigee include:

• API management. Apigee runs test/stage and production environments, can customize pre-and post-flows, and automatically authorize for services with different methods including API Keys and oAuth.
  Apigee’s pre-built integrated portal has helped Picsart “greatly” in the time the company has been using it, Stanescu says. He praised its flexibility and its rate-limiting function, “which allows us to properly define and secure our products.”

• Developer support. With Apigee, Picsart now takes an “API-first” approach to developing new features by using microservice architectures. They’re exposing APIs via their developer portal, which allows them to describe precisely how developers can use each API.
  
• Apigee helps Picsart’s own developers use APIs to simplify the development process and save the company time and money. In conjunction with other Google products, Apigee is providing Picsart with the data and analytics it needs to view and monitor API-related productivity improvements.

• Security. Apigee’s out-of-the-box security requires no specialized knowledge or skill to implement. Picsart relies on Apigee security features such as including headers to set up security parameters, and custom rate-limiting policies and quotas, allowing the company to avoid stack overflow from API calls.

As a result, the company has experienced zero API-related security incidents, Stanescu notes. “We’re definitely grateful to Apigee for this,” he adds. Recently, Stanescu says, a company performed penetration testing on Picsart’s APIs, looking for vulnerabilities, but failed to discover any security flaws or threats. Apigee’s easy-to-use, but powerful security features are helping Picsart keep its clients and customers safe and secure.

From scrappy startup to business core

In the three years since implementing Google Apigee, Picsart’s API business unit has gone from a seemingly simple request to a critical product offering enabling new and recurring revenue.

“It’s part of the foundation of our business,” says Jinny Jung. “It powers our entire API external-facing business. We wouldn’t be able to sell APIs to developers and partners without the Apigee API gateway. We wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without Apigee.”

Apigee is helping Picsart in another key way, too: its integration with products like BigQuery, Google’s data analytics platform that lets it stay on top of which APIs are most used. That information guides every aspect of the business and helps the company develop and release new generative AI-powered products.

“The data absolutely informs what we choose to develop and where we put our resources,” Jung says. “Apigee makes it super easy for us to track API use and see the trends.”

With Apigee, Picsart is opening up a new world of creative design to audiences across all markets and demographics, while avoiding the stress that comes with a costly development process. Today, generative AI apps continue capturing imaginations, unlocking the ability to create awe-inspiring art with only a few natural language prompts. Picsart and Apigee will continue working together to provide a canvas through APIs no matter where an artist may be.

According to a recent Accenture report, large businesses deploy an average of 500 different applications. This trend shows no signs of slowing down, with the majority of respondents signaling plans to acquire even more applications. No surprise, all these applications present a number of integration challenges, which the impending wave of generative AI in software development only promises to further intensify.

Two years ago, we introduced Apigee Integration as an add-on capability to Apigee API Management. From conversations with customers, it’s become clear that you want to access these capabilities directly from the Google Cloud console. Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Application Integration, a standalone Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) designed to help you connect your applications visually, with no code. Best of all, you can now get started with Application Integration with no upfront financial commitment, even if you’re not an existing Apigee customer. 

What is Application Integration?

As a cloud-native product, Application Integration helps you automate business processes by connecting any application — both home-grown and third-party SaaS — with simple point-and-click configurations, so you can quickly and easily construct, maintain, and scale your integrations. Application Integration offers the following features:

Visual integration designer: An Intuitive drag-and-drop interface allows anyone to build workflows with no complex coding or manual processes. With the visual integration designer, anyone can simply drag-and-drop individual control elements (such as edges, forks, and joins) to build custom integration patterns of any complexity.

Plug-and-play connectors: A library of 75+ pre-built connectors makes it easy to connect to a number of Google Cloud services (e.g., BigQuery, Pub/Sub) and many third-party applications, including Salesforce, MongoDB, and NetSuite. 

Automated triggers and transformations: With built-in triggers, you can execute integrations on an API call, Cloud Pub/Sub event, Salesforce events, or using Cloud Scheduler. An intuitive data mapping editor and comprehensive mapping functions enable you to address complex data transformation requirements in no time.

Unified platform: Whether you’re building APIs in Apigee, ingesting data using Pub/Sub, receiving events from Cloud Storage using EventArc, or something else, Application Integration works seamlessly with other integration services to provide comprehensive capabilities for your use case. 

Customer praise for Application Integration

In the enterprise, different teams adopt applications to support a task in their business processes. However, the need for information exchange among these teams can spawn complex integrations that require a lot of arduous planning.

Application Integration abstracts these development complexities, so customers  can focus on building value. OVO Energy uses Application Integration to automate communications in their critical business processes. “We were looking for an integration solution that was very low-code yet configurable, robust, and scalable,” said Chris Parker, Product Manager at OVO Energy. “We needed a simple solution that allowed us to get data from multiple parts of the company, supplement an existing data point with relevant information and funnel it to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud,” added Graham Vosper, Technology lead at OVO Energy.

But changes in business processes are inevitable, forcing continuous shifts to existing integrations – sometimes even rendering them obsolete. “Using Application Integration was very simple. With just a couple of clicks, our team quickly adapted to this new product and became productive,” said Graham.

A growing library of connectors in Application Integration makes it easy to connect to new applications and ensures any changes in connecting to the end application is automatically supported. OVO Energy has taken notice. “Configurability and traceability in Application Integration allows our developers to build and maintain our integrations without in-depth skills. We now have much better visibility into our information flow and failure rates,” said Graham. 

Get started today

Today’s integration problems require a comprehensive approach that spans applications, systems, and data. Application Integration is part of Google Cloud’s Integration Services portfolio, designed to address your end-to-end integration needs. The portfolio covers a wide range of use cases like data integration, API Management, and event-driven architectures. You can get started with Application Integration with no financial commitment by using the free tier. Learn more, explore a sample e-commerce integration, or jumpstart your development with quickstart tutorials.

For years, Google has been committed to maximizing developer productivity. In 2019, we announced the general availability of Skaffold, a command-line tool that facilitates continuous development and delivery for containerized applications. Today, we’re excited to announce that Skaffold V2 is now generally available.

Skaffold V2 expands Skaffold’s supported platforms and architectures with the introduction of Cloud Run as a supported deployer, and now supports building from and deploying to both ARM and x86 architectures. Skaffold V2 also offers enhanced support for CI/CD and GitOps workflows, with the introduction of the skaffold render phase, verify phase, and kpt integration. Best of all, all existing Skaffold configurations are fully compatible with Skaffold V2, and upgrading from V1 is as easy as running skaffold fix.

Expanded platform support

Since its inception, Skaffold has supported deploying applications to Kubernetes, using either kubectl or Helm deployers. Deploying to Kubernetes with Skaffold unlocks the benefits of improved velocity from source to prod, with reusable building blocks for iterative development and CI/CD.

We’re excited to expand these benefits to Cloud Run, Google’s serverless container runtime. Cloud Run provides a fully managed platform for any containerized application, and includes features such as automatic resource scaling and integrated storage, security, and monitoring solutions.

It’s easy to get started with Skaffold and Cloud Run; all you need is a Cloud Run service config and a few small updates to your skaffold.yaml. Skaffold also powers Cloud Deploy’s support of Cloud Run. Check out our documentation to learn more.

In addition to the new deployment target, the expanded set of compatible image-architecture configurations with Skaffold V2 helps developers ensure that the architecture of the machine on which an image is built is compatible with the architecture of the machine on which the image is intended to be run. Skaffold now intelligently checks the architecture of your local machine as well as the target Kubernetes cluster before building your images, allowing you to deploy to ARM, x86 or multi-arch clusters from a x86 or ARM machine without any manual configuration.

Check out our documentation to learn more about deploying to Cloud Run and managing ARM workloads.

CI/CD and DevOps, simplified

Skaffold helps developers implement CI/CD and DevOps workflows by providing a set of reusable building blocks for repeatable build, tag, and deploy steps. With Skaffold, the same config can be shared in development and production, leveraging Skaffold profiles to implement environment-specific configuration.

With Skaffold V2, the Skaffold render phase is now distinct from the deploy phase. The output of the Skaffold render phase is a manifest, hydrated with tagged image names and templated values, which can then be persisted in source control before deployment as part of a GitOps workflow.

In addition to the render phase, Skaffold V2’s new verify phase helps to configure post-deployment tests. This phase can be used to configure a series of test containers that are then monitored to ensure that the deployment was successful. This allows developers to integrate this verification step into reusable deployment pipelines rather than running these tests manually.

Finally, the introduction of kpt as a supported renderer in Skaffold V2 provides a sophisticated syntax for serially transforming and validating your manifests, unlocking additional customizability and verification in your GitOps workflows. Using Skaffold makes it easy to adopt kpt because you can take advantage of kpt’s transformation and validation functionality without needing to write any separate kpt configuration. It’s as easy as adding a few stanzas to your existing skaffold.yaml. Kpt can also be used alongside Skaffold’s pre-existing integrations with renderers Helm and Kustomize.

Check out our documentation to learn more about the Skaffold render phase, verify phase, and kpt integration.

Upgrading to Skaffold V2

Getting started with Skaffold V2 is easy. If you’re new to Skaffold, check out the V2 installation guide for platform-specific installation instructions.

If you’re an existing Skaffold user, upgrading to Skaffold V2 is simple and requires no manual configuration changes. All of your existing Skaffold configurations will continue to work as-is with Skaffold V2. Simply download the Skaffold V2 binary and run skaffold fix to update your config. Check out the V2 upgrade guide for more details.

Finally, check out our documentation for more detailed instructions on taking advantage of all of the new features introduced in Skaffold V2.

What’s next?

If you’re interested in harnessing the power of Skaffold for serverless workloads, check out our documentation for using Skaffold V2 with Cloud Run.

Also, be sure to check out Cloud Deploy, Google’s fully managed continuous delivery offering, which leverages Skaffold to construct reusable deployment pipelines.

We’re excited to hear from you. As always, you can reach out to us on GitHub and Slack.