How Worldline puts APIs at the heart of payments services

Editor’s note: Today we hear from Worldline, a financial services organization that creates and operates digital platforms handling billions of critical transactions between companies, partners, and customers every year. In this post, Wordline head of alliances and partnerships Michaël Petiot and head of API platform support Tanja Foing explain how APIs and API management enable this €2.3 billion enterprise to offer its services to partners in a wide variety of industries.

Worldline is the European leader in the payment and transactional services industry, with activities organized around three axes: merchant services, financial services including equensWorldline, and mobility and e-transactional services. In order to be more agile, we’re undergoing a transformation in how we work internally and with our partners, putting APIs at the heart of how we’re connecting with everyone.

Leveraging APIs for third-party collaboration
Like most companies, Worldline collaborates more and more with third parties to deliver the products and services our customers expect. We want to move faster, and open up our platforms to partners who can develop new use cases in payments and customer engagement. To meet evolving technology, business, and regulatory demands for connecting our ecosystem of partners and developers, we needed a robust API platform. It was especially important to us that third parties could connect easily and securely to our platform. 

We chose Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform as our company-wide standard. Initially, we leaned toward an open source tool, but Apigee won us over, thanks to its complete feature set, available right out of the box. The Apigee security and analytics features are particularly important to us because of our collaboration with banking and fintech customers and partners. 

Developing bespoke customer solutions
Our first three API use cases include: digital banking, connected cars, and an internal developer platform. 

Banks need their data to be properly categorized and highly secure, and Apigee gives us the tools to provide the right environment for them. Leveraging Apigee, our digital banking solution offers a dedicated developer portal for our customers in a separate environment. It has its own architecture to access back-end services as well. With functionality ranging from trusted authentication to contract completion, payments, and contact management, Worldline digital banking customers can tap into APIs to interact with us at every stage. 

An important trend in transport and logistics is the integration of real-time data with third parties. Our Connected Car offering is a white-label solution that provides APIs for a car manufacturer’s fleet of cars. This offering enables fleet owners to exchange data with their entire ecosystem. It also offers a relatively closed environment with a limited number of developers accessing it, and we expose these APIs via the Apigee gateway. We use Apigee analytics features to track how the APIs are used and how they’re performing, and then make changes as needed. 

Our third use case is internal; we’re building a developer portal in order to make APIs easier to access and quicker to deploy.

Our partner ecosystem includes lessors, insurance companies, repair shops, logistics companies and end-users. Everyone benefits from advanced APIs for real-time secure exchanges, combined with open-exchange protocols such as the Remote Fleet Management Systems standard (used by truck manufacturers) in order to provide the best service to customers.

We recently presented to the Worldline product management community how we can scale up to a large portfolio of API solutions using Apigee as an accelerator. the presentation was a success, and illustrates how we can leverage the platform as a tool for driving innovation throughout Worldline—and throughout our growing ecosystem of automotive and financial services customers