Arkéa
Arkéa is a prominent leader in banking and insurance in Europe. The Arkéa Group includes Arkéa Crédit Mutuel Bretagne, Southwest Credit Mutuel, Crédit Mutuel Massif Central, and 20 specialized subsidiaries
Arkéa’s Assignment
PSD2, Involving Non-Technical Stakeholders, Security, Engineering Culture Shift, and Collaboration
The PSD2 Regulations
PSD2, a European Union regulation, enforces a number of regulations on the Financial sector, including the necessity of banks to provide open banking services. Arkéa has been involved in open banking for several years by providing white label banking services and saw PSD2 as an opportunity to extend their open banking features. To further their open banking offerings, they needed to deploy 10-15 additional APIs to accelerate the digitization of their bank. While PSD2 made up only a small percentage of new services (10-15 APIs) in development, they are also developing internally core banking services and orchestration services. These new services would need to be exposed via APIs that needed to be designed, developed, managed, and governed.
Involving Non-Technical Stakeholders
The most successful APIs follow the API Design-First Principle. One of the central principles of API Design-First is defining a clear business objective, and balancing that objective with the technical goals. Arkéa’s API engineering teams are made up of approximately 150 employees distributed across a large organization. To facilitate collaboration within individual teams and across their organization, they required a tool that would enable their product manager by providing with collaborative tooling, access to the developing process, and an easy to understand GUI.
API Design-First Culture Shift
Arkéa needed a method for promoting Design-First principles within their organization to maintain consistent, well designed APIs. A single source of truth with collaborative features between non-technical and technical staff was paramount to achieving first-class API design.
A Secure Solution
Financial institutions require a high degree of security to protect the sensitive data they handle on a daily basis. Arkéa needed a solution that would ensure that data could not be exposed under any circumstance, provided SAML support, and that their data was hosted in Europe. An on-prem deployment was of critical importance for maintaining the high level of security that Arkéa required.
API Design-First Testing
Arkéa Design-First strategy required an integrated testing suite that would allow them to test their APIs during the design process instead of a post-production UI testing workflow.
The Stoplight Strategy
PSD2
To rapidly accelerate the development of APIs required to meet PSD2 regulations and expose Open Banking services, Arkéa looked to the Stoplight platform. Stoplight provided a single source of truth and an intuitive editor that accelerated development and cut down on costs.
Involving Non-Technical Stakeholders
API Design-First principles require non-technical stakeholders to be involved in the API Design process to ensure that APIs meet business objectives and not just technical goals. Stoplight helped Arkéa’s non-technical stakeholders be involved in the design process by providing a single-source-of-truth where engineers and product owners could collaborate on designs. The visual editor allowed product owners an easy method for understanding the API specifications in development. The single-source-of-truth paired with robust collaborative tooling also helped promote API Design-First culturally by providing a clear workflow for all the pertinent stakeholders that emphasized participation.
Nicolas Tisserand, API Architect at Arkéa group
Nicolas Tisserand, API Architect at Arkéa group
Training and Execution with Stoplight’s Visual Editor
Arkéa started to see immediate results when it came to on-boarding new engineers or assisting other engineers due to Stoplight’s simplicity and WYSIWYG editors. Instead of having to teach all stakeholders the Swagger spec, they held Stoplight training sessions that assisted in rapidly on-boarding technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Nicolas Tisserand, API Architect at Arkéa group
Nicolas Tisserand, API Architect at Arkéa group
A Secure Solution
Stoplight provided an on-premise solution that maintained their high level of security by bringing Stoplight within their firewall. To simplify and expedite the on-boarding process, Stoplight migrated all their users from our hosted solution and integrated with their SAML identity.
API Design-First Testing
Arkéa utilized the design-first approach to enable native contract testing based on their OAS specification. Moreover, they have been able to integrate their contract test directly into their delivery pipeline. This enabled them to design not only better quality APIs, but also automated testing which in turn decreased time to delivery.