How Investec marries foundational and pioneering tech forces – CIO

Describing it as “secure open banking,” this API fabric makes it simpler for the bank’s corporates and private business clients to connect with them. “Our transactional banking clients can connect through these APIs in real-time,” she says. “This enables them to access their transactions, and do their ERP integration or make bulk payments directly with us. In doing so, we’ve created operational efficiency and helped them reduce costs, which is a big win because everyone wants lower costs.” As this solution involves external stakeholders, Thaver says the idea started out as an internal business and technology conversation but, in order to make it real, they had to sit down with business leaders, and then with clients, to discuss possibilities, as well as potential stumbling blocks. 

The bank wanted to use APIs to change the experience for the developer community and make their lives easier. According to Thaver, this was the impetus behind their programmable card. At a very high level, Investec issues a card that has generic transactional capabilities but because they’ve wrapped it with APIs, they’ve given the developer community the opportunity to personalize the card and program it to do whatever they want it to do. If someone wanted to keep track of their monthly budget, for example, they could use the API to do an analysis on spending habits. A developer could even program a card with a specific spend limit for a particular store. “From a developer experience perspective, it’s given us massive benefits because we might be the only organization that has a community of banking professionals or developers working on a programmable card API,” she says.  And they’re now trying to create a low code environment so anyone—not just devs—can benefit from this programmable functionality.

“All of this also future proofs the business,” she adds. “If Investec were to merge with another business or acquire a business, we want to do this at pace. Having our estate wrapped in APIs enables us to gain a consolidated view of all our systems and seamlessly integrate and plug into other systems.”

Prioritizing scalability

Just like the rest of the industry, Investec needs to drive scale, and, to do so; it’s going to use the cloud. “But cloud isn’t going to give the cost efficiencies the business expects if we just lift and shift everything,” she says. “So, we have to modernize first and then move smaller chunks into the cloud so we can enjoy the cost benefits we want.”