When developers integrate financial data APIs with platforms and applications they can enable access to real-time financial information, reduce development time, and ensure regulatory compliance. Quality data APIs are critical to developing well-performing financial software products and delivering them quickly to the market.
Types of financial data APIs
There are many different types of APIs that provide financial data, such as:
- Financial services APIs: Provide access to core financial services. Developers can use these APIs to add data-driven capabilities to finance apps, such as credit card applications with instant approval and personalized budgeting.
- Investment research APIs: Enable financial systems to aggregate and analyze data for investments. These APIs can include information on investment portfolios, portfolio holdings, securities, financial markets, and potential risks for different assets.
- Stock market data APIs: Allow developers to integrate national or global stock market exchange data with third-party platforms. They typically provide real-time and historical data for indexes and funds, equities, market data, and trading activity.
- Open banking APIs: These APIs exist largely due to regulations enacted by the European Union. They allow third-party applications to access customer financial data when given explicit permission by the user. Use cases for open banking APIs include financial management and peer-to-peer (P2P) money transfers.
- News APIs: A news API delivers relevant news for various categories, including finance. Financial analysis platforms can use a news API for investor intelligence, due diligence, ESG scoring and assessment, and predictive modeling.
Before proceeding with financial data API integration, you should assess the API based on several key factors.
What to look for in an API for financial data
Not all data APIs are created equal. You should evaluate each financial data API for quality and to ensure it meets your use case requirements:
- Coverage: Make sure the API provides the type of financial data you’ll need and evaluate the scope of coverage. How many sources does the API draw data from? Does it have enough coverage to support multiple use cases? Automated financial analysis platforms need massive volumes of diverse data to provide accurate insights.
- Freshness and latency: Most finance sector applications require real-time data and low latency. For example, an application designed for investment research won’t deliver accurate results if the information it ingests and analyzes is outdated. A stock market trading platform will not work well if the data API takes seconds to respond to requests. Every millisecond of latency counts when trading valuable stocks!
- Data quality and structure: A high-quality data API gathers information only from reliable and useful sources. Also, the data it returns should be clean and noise free, no spam, junk data, boilerplate text, raw HTML and code, missing values, incorrect data types, or inconsistent data. The data should also be structured and enriched so machines can easily understand and consume it.
- Regulatory compliance: You’ll need to ensure that any financial data API you integrate complies with applicable regulations. For example, a P2P payment app with customers in the EU would require a data API that complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). If the app also uses a payment processing API, it will need to comply with the EU’s revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2).
Next, we’ll cover why data APIs are critical to integrating financial data.
Data APIs are essential to financial data integration
Data APIs are critical to developing reliable, accurate, and fast financial platforms and applications. Benefits of integrating APIs for financial data include:
- Access to real-time financial data: Real-time data is critical for automated financial platforms because most actions and insights are time sensitive. For example, stock market prices, financial markets, and account balances can all change rapidly. Integrating a real-time financial API with a financial analysis platform also means customers can access and analyze the latest information as soon as it becomes available.
- Reduced development time: Most automated financial platforms today are driven by powerful models. Data professionals spend a significant amount of time cleaning data for model training. However, a quality financial API provides clean and structured data. The development team doesn’t have to spend time preparing data, and they can add financial data to the platform with only a few lines of code. Teams can focus on adding new features and delivering deeper insights to customers.
- Regulatory compliance: Financial data providers must comply with applicable regulations and industry standards. When developers integrate data APIs into platforms or applications, they shouldn’t have to worry about legal issues. For example, all Webz.io APIs comply with applicable global regulations.
Integrating data APIs with finance analysis platforms and applications saves developers time and boosts innovation. Developers can easily enable access to real-time financial data and add new features and capabilities quickly.
You need quality financial data
Your financial platform is only as good as the data it relies on. You need high-quality financial data from multiple sources, including news sources to develop well-performing and reliable finance applications, from business services and investments to stock market trading and open banking.
