The main obstacle to wider use of application programming interfaces (APIs) by corporate treasuries is access. Treasury management systems are not designed to take in APIs because there is no data standard and use of APIs requires a lot of additional information in addition to static files.
A treasury management system (TMS) is built on a defined payload of data, explains Brett Turner, chief executive of open banking platform Trovata.
“An API is like connecting a firehose into that data pipeline and then turning it on,” he says. “These are 30- or even 40-year-old systems designed to handle data mapped perfectly to an ISO specification and all of a sudden you’re trying to bring in data willy-nilly and then go to the next bank where it’s going to be completely different.”
Our view is the more data the better, because that is what a modern system does
As well as treasury management systems being unable to handle the data because it is not standardized, the legacy database architecture cannot handle the additional information in this form.
