Driving fintech growth with smarter data access stragies

Betsy Eisenberg: Welcome everybody. I am Betsy Eisenberg, Head of Customer Success here at Akoya. We are a data access network that partners with both financial institutions and fintechs to make sharing financial data more secure. I am excited to have a couple of our fintech partners joining us today to tackle the topic of fintech growth through smarter data access strategies. 

Personally, I think this is a really compelling topic as the use of apps continues to grow, making the need for performance, security, and a great user experience is so important. As we get started, I wanna introduce our three panelists who are joining me today. 

We have Bill Jetter, group product manager at Intuit. Joining us also is Josh Lockhart, CTO, from Aeropay. And finally Brendan Wood, CEO at SnapTrade. Welcome gentlemen. Thank you for joining us. Let's do this we're gonna jump right in with the first question which is really the crux of today's webinar around why shift from a legacy method to an API in the first place. 

And I'd like to start with you, Bill, if that's okay. Because Intuit has supported data connectivity for years. What made your team really prioritize a shift to an API based access process?

Bill Jetter: Yeah. Thank you for the question, Betsy. Our journey began back in 2015 and around 2016. We we formed a group that was gonna focus on API connections. 

And the reason behind that is that prior to 2016, Intuit had been very much invested in screen scraping for data. And screen scraping was an easy way to piggyback off a consumer's online banking platform, if you will, to get access to their data. It was very easy to establish a connection and get the data you wanted. 

But it had its drawbacks, and one of the drawbacks was that the websites are, and then eventually the mobile sites, were fragile. Banks would put in promotional campaigns that would make changes to the websites and the scripts we would use to do the screen scraping would break. 

And so we had to invest a lot of overhead and maintenance. And it's just making sure that we would fix screen scripts on an ongoing basis, almost real time as we identify these breakages. And to establish as the bullet point here says, durable connection that doesn't break, that's always that allows us to get the data whenever we want with very minimal user intervention. 

That was really the motivation for our getting into and promoting API connections. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Yeah the emphasis on, course correcting for the unreliable factor of the screen scraping and building for that better user experience really does set the stage. I'm gonna shift over Josh to you from the perspective of aero pay, you operate in a pretty regulated space. 

Does that ever, has that evolution added complexity here as well? 

Josh Lockhart: Yeah, totally. It to the point you mentioned, right? Aeropay really cut its teeth in, highly regulated industries. We really started off in cannabis and got really good at understanding those landscapes and how to manage those transactions and things like that. 

And one thing we found even as we've moved into, less risky industries is that fidelity of data is really most important things is a big chunk of what we do is guaranteeing a transaction for our merchants. So knowing a balance is fresh and knowing, information and heuristics about the user's account really helps us be more successful in and administering those transactions across that industry. 

So the moving to an API based infrastructure has really helped further that cost for sure. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Okay. So we've heard now reliability that the APIs offer and now fidelity of data. I'm curious also about speed and performance and what that plays in this shift. Brendan, how does performance expectation for your customers and your industry influence your decision? 

Because I have a feeling something like real time data. Given what TTR focuses on in your users is probably quite important. 

Brendan Wood: Yeah, absolutely. It's critical for what we do. So at TTR we operate a unified trading API that's compatible with most stockbrokers. So we make it easy for users of those stockbrokers to connect their accounts to third party applications, to share their account data, and even do order execution back in the other direction. 

So essentially users are often making active decisions based on the data we return, deciding what they're going to invest in, or even going, making those trades on the spot. However, when you're dealing with investments, things change quickly enough on the markets that it's important to serve fresh data. 

But even if haven't placed a trade recently, the value of your position in your account could have changed. There could be cash coming in into your account. There could be lots of things. Pardon me a lot. A lot of our early integrations were API first. The first probably three or four integrations that we built were API first. 

But we exhausted the set of brokers that had APIs that were easy to connect with in the first place. And so we started adding scrapers to essentially expand the set of brokers that we could work with. And of course, you run into issues where it's expensive on a per call basis. 

There are high latency, you have to do this scraping login approach in order to get the data and make sure that it's fresh. And so it ends up to, being daily snapshots as like the typical feature implementation. Which just not like really suitable for investing applications. 

So basically switching or to API based access allows us to have really cheap, fast calls to get the data exactly when it's needed. And it opens up new use cases for the API because it can really power trading use cases. And in the context of order execution, like that's really the big thing. 

It's important to have reliable low latency connections when you're placing orders over these connections. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Yeah, so speed is an, is another piece that it's almost like the trifecta here. You've got speed, reliability, and precision, all contributing to the APIs being the preferred solution and really winning as the path forward for the data access. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Perfect. Excellent. I guess building off of this also as you're at it, these connections become more stable. They become more consistent. I gotta imagine also that benefits the customer, but it's gotta also, I would imagine, improve your systems and how they run behind the scenes. 

So I'm curious if we can dive in a little bit into the I concept of operational efficiencies and performance. I think we've touched on that with reliability, but like how does that shape up? So staying with you, Brendan, what changes did you notice with the APIs in terms of success rates and what did it mean for your user experience? 

Brendan Wood: Yeah, so there's three key metrics that we track when it comes to our connectivity. So the first is initial connection success rate. And so, a user shows intent to connect to one of these stockbrokers and Are you successful in connecting it? And so there's two big drivers as to whether or not that works. 

So one is the drop off. So when a user is going through the connection flow, if you present them with a page that says, give us your username and password to your bank account that's a pretty scary thing to do and for good reason. So there's a huge drop percentage of users who when they hit that page, you say, actually, I don't really think I want to use this application enough to share those sensitive credentials with. 

So huge drop off you get from that. And the second is that once the user has given their consent, whether  they're giving you credentials or whether they're doing it through a secure OAuth grant the failure rate essentially becomes non-existent once they've given consent, assuming you're working with a proper OAuth flow. 

Those two, two parts of reliability for initial caching success is like lower drop off and higher success rate once you've gotten consent from the user. Then so that was one of the key metrics. Two other metrics are connection, longevity, and data reliability. So when you're dealing with sprayer type connections, you typically have like weeks to, maybe a few months is like the connect typical lifespan of that for a connection before the user has to come in and log in again. 

When you're dealing with a proper API, typically that's anywhere from six months to a year, sometimes multiple years or indefinite. And it's really if it's indefinite, it's up to the user to choose if they want to revoke their consent at some point in the future. So you end up with like permanent, reliable connections. 

And so the third part would be data reliability. How consistent is the data you get through? Do you get noise? Do changes in the broker's UI? Cause issues in your data feed. And so when you move to an API first solution you don't  really have any issues like that. You can still have some issues and like sometimes there are bugs on the other end or sometimes things are misclassified, but they're much more rare and they're easier to identify when you come across them. 

So all three of those dramatic improvements across the board when we're using an API first solution. 

Betsy Eisenberg: And it's amazing. And when you to hear a partner of ours, talk this through because it's a very common refrain that we've heard from recipients and it really highlights for me the win-win here of having a smoother, easier, better customer experience, which is obviously keeps your customers happy and reduces your churn. 

I'm curious, Josh, on the arrow pay side of things, what efficiencies have you seen for your platform your users as it relates to the use of API connections? 

Josh Lockhart: Yeah. The consistency I would say is paramount here, right? One of the things we really pride ourselves on is allowing our merchants to have a full a full branded experience, even at the point of linking their bank. 

We want to be partners in allowing 'em to do that and not necessarily take space. So having APIs underneath really allows us to cater and tailor that experience without, moving away from the, breaking the mental mold for the consumer. And then once a user really gets into logging into their bank via, the, that experience we see a pretty consistent timeframe that it takes 'em to do that. 

At this point, less than a minute. Awesome. We the nice thing about it is, we're also internally not spending nearly as much time trying to manage, like you said, the screen scraping experience and the level of data we get back from one bank versus another. It really has allowed us to focus on the most important thing, which is getting a user, they're bank linked, and then moving to the most important part, which is, making a transaction for them. 

For that merchant. So it's really allowed us to be a lot faster and a lot more efficient with with that user experience. 

Betsy Eisenberg: That's great. The speed is pretty special in terms of being able to say, we can do this in under a minute. It's there, it's durable. I just, I think one of the words that Bill, you started us off with I'd be curious, bill, from Intuit's perspective as what has adoption API adoption really meant for you in terms of the reliability of your tools and also the product maintenance? 

Bill Jetter: The reliability is improved? Definitely. So as just building off what we shared earlier, the API connection is much more reliable than the screens scrape connection. And so there's greater confidence in being able to get the data when you need it. And that's important to the applications to know that I can get the data whenever I want to do it, and I could provide a better personalized. 

Experience through my product because of that, so I can get all the data I need when I need it. And then you have your product. Then develop insights, and or if it's like a PFM, for example, personal financial management system, be able to provide some insights into optimizing, certain positions, making recommendations catch, catching cases where maybe the user has to pay a bill, for example. 

And you're letting the application do a lot more for the user because you have access to the data whenever you want to have it. And often when we move to an API connection, we can get additional data that's not necessarily available through the website. That assist with automating our processes as well. 

And so it we found that by moving to the APIs, it really enhances the user experience. In terms of, it also comes with a lot of cost savings. Both for the bank and for the fintech. So, it is a win-win. When Init first entered the business, we would actually do a cost benefit analysis for the banks to show them how they would save money by moving to an API based data access platform versus having a company like Intuit Screens scraped their web servers. 

And the burden and the cost of standing up more web servers to support aggregators in addition to their own clients accessing websites. And so when you remove the burden of having to stand up web services to meet the needs of aggregators and put 'em on a more efficient API, the bank save is saving a lot of money. 

And Intuit is saving money in that the cost of having to do screen scrape maintenance goes way down. The ability, standing up an API connection goes much more quickly than it does with a screen scrape with a screen. 

Also, customers sometimes are reticent to share, their username and passwords, or have you look at the, their sites to help create that script in the first place. And so we find that with the API, those are easy to stand up, those are easy to get enrollment with. And so you get a lot more adoption of users when they go through an API connection or even just standing up that connection in the first place, because it doesn't require any user involvement. And so it is a much better process, both from the consumer perspective, from perspective and from the bank's perspective. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Yeah, it, I mean they're, these all contribute to what looks like a very positive ROI for taking, making these moves to the APIs. 

I wanna pull a thread on something you just mentioned, bill, also about that reticent to share credentials. I think, Brendan, you mentioned this as well. As we, as we these pieces roll out there is a different consent experience there. User's no longer getting, Hey, gimme your ID and password. 

I'm curious, Josh. Aeropay is a mobile first offering. Are there learnings that you have found as it relates to browser UX versus mobile that are allowing for a better mobile experience in this, in this different consent flow process that the user goes through? 

Josh Lockhart: Yeah. One of the things that Aeropay really prides itself on is our network. 

We are constantly making improvements to, to recognize users within our network and for merchants that are using our product. And especially like you said on the go a merchant, a user going into a merchant and, trying to pay with their bank, being instantly recognized as a very important piece and their bank already being linked and them having already given consent really helps the outcome of whatever action that it, that user takes there. 

And then, and I think another learning is what we talked about earlier, is being able to allow this, banking API integration look and feel and be at, as ubiquitous as the merchants experience really helps with the experience for that end user. We've noticed that when we brand. 

Our experience to, along with the merchant, that user repeat and user conversion is up pretty significantly. Super important piece there. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Great. Great. Bill, are there similar things that the Intuit team has seen in terms of improvements to the consent experience? I think so much of this is an element of trust and so important of putting the trust in the partner. 

Are there specific practices that you might highlight as things to adopt, to improve the consent this way? 

Bill Jetter: Yeah I'd just like to just build off the mobile first. Everyone's moving to mobile first. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Yeah. 

Bill Jetter: It is, especially if the application experience is personalized and insightful. 

Those insights are delivered through typically a mobile device much more efficiently than a desktop. But the big advantage with mobile is that there's a thing on the, on your mobile device, typically a camera. And or some other identifier, biometric device that allows the mobile device to do the authentication for you versus doing the old fashioned way of entering a, or typing in the username and password. 

And so what we've seen. With our metrics that also measures the user experience on an ad connection flow. Is that where there's a big drop off is typically on the authentication part, so the user goes through the flow. They're excited, they collect their bank. The, there's an experience that says, okay, here's what's gonna happen next. 

They go in there and they authenticate and they're expecting to have an experience very similar to their own online banking or mobile banking, which is, I'm just gonna steer in the mobile device and I'm gonna get access to the account. And there's a big surprise because the majority of the authentication experiences or a fallback to, the 1990s where all of a sudden. 

Typing in username and passwords and if you're like me, you've long forgotten what your username and password is, especially if you're having a strong password generator that's putting it in there. You have no idea what that is. And it really, there it is a big drop off and you'll see a lot of hardy users try and, okay, I got, I'll change by username and password to log in. 

And I'll choose an easy to remember password so I can get through this, and then I'll go back and change the password again. That's stronger. And so it, it introduces a lot of friction into the whole process. By moving to biometrics, we found that often you could take the authentication success and jump it up 20 points. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Amazing.

Bill Jetter: Just by doing that alone, and it's a dramatic jump in the user experience. And it's some something that we always encourage our banking partners to adopt. 

Betsy Eisenberg: I just wanna repeat that number again, because I think that's really, material is 20% improvement is great. 

I think that's one of those great numbers from a conversion perspective that showcases how valuable this investment can be. What I'd like to do also is now now that we've talked a bit about this better UX the, reduction in the drop off building of the trust driving those results is, let's dive onto a bit about the performance improvements that you are seeing. 

Brendan. How have you seen your business growth or your customer retention improvement? And is it dir is it improving directly tied to the performance? Are there connections that you can make between the APIs and what you're seeing from a growth perspective?

Brendan Wood: Yeah, absolutely. Having dedicated APIs is really opening up more avenues for our business. 

So as I mentioned, we're we operate a unified trading API, and trading related apps are our focus. So having these direct APIs gives us the ability to offer the highest level of product performance to these customers, and as a result, it's bringing in more customers for us, but it's also providing more valuable value to our brokerage partners. 

So in terms of bringing in new customers, about 90% of the customers that we've onboarded in the last quarter have an order execution use case, and most of them wouldn't have signed up with us without that execution capability because really it's core to their business. In terms of value that our brokerage partners are getting as a benefit here just for, I'm cherry picking one example here, but there's a broker that we started working with last year. 

We originally had a scraper based integration with them. And based on partnership discussions with them and getting to know 'em we. Managed a transition over to a direct API and within six months of going from that scraper integration to a direct API integration the order volume that we were pushing to that broker increased by about a hundred times on a like monthly month basis. 

If you look at, what we pushed in the middle of summer last year versus like around the new year, it's about a hundred times the volume, which is wild. And they're picking up all that additional volume. Simply because they have an API that is the right tool for the job. 

We can enable more use cases with it. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Great. Josh, I have the same question for you. As it relates to Aeropay, has your business seen growth directly tied to the performance? 

Josh Lockhart: Absolutely. And in a massive way. I mentioned it earlier, bread and butter is really understanding how these banks are linked for, particular users attempting to make a transaction on any of our merchants. 

And everything from our fraud model that, that monitors and makes decisions on transactions to our representative engine is really based in that, in having that information. We had experiences with previous providers where we were, where stale data really presented a challenge. 

We weren't able to make the appropriate determinations on a transaction. And when we did make those determinations, sometimes they were wrong. Again, having, proper APIs and again, the fidelity of data being where it is it's really helped the performance from every front be, the highest we can make it. 

So much so to the point that in, in some of our industries we are seeing near credit card rate on, as opposed to pay by bank of 90% acceptance rates. We're seeing transactions go through and we have a lot of confidence that those won't return or, no, no type of administration. Administrative returns or anything like that will happen. 

So extremely successful performance increase on multiple fronts on our side. 

Betsy Eisenberg: That's great. That's great. Bill, question for you how is the API re reliability shaping Intuits ability to support long-term customer and developer needs? 

Bill Jetter: The, I'll start with the developer needs First is that applications are. 

Do, do benefit from faster development times and time to market. As the graph shows here primarily due to the data quality and the data reliability. And I think that those teams have been mentioned earlier. What you find is if the developers have consistently clean available data their coding needs to be less defensive in checking for, bad data or missing data. 

It makes the, the development more streamlined rather than defensive and looking for errors along the way. Not to say that it always goes away fully, but it substantially streamlines the product development to the point where we do have a lot of productivity improvements in our product development. 

And again, for the strategic is Intuit's is north Star, is that. We'll acquire the data for you and Intuit will do everything for you, whether it's managing your small business financials doing your taxes for you managing your personal financial management. 

If we have that data our systems could be proactive and actually using rules based and now AI based, processes to really automate everything for you and that is really driven a lot by the access to abundant clean API data. Yeah. So it's, it is a tremendous productivity boost and customer retention boost as well. 

Betsy Eisenberg: That's great. It's amazing how better data can not only serve our customers better, but it really improves the developer perspective as well. Both of which, are so impactful for a company as it continues to grow and scale and reduce churn. All those things are valuable. Now that we've talked about how these API strategies are paying off, f with a forward looking lens. What advice would you all have as it relates to trends that are shaping kind of the road ahead? Bill, I'm gonna start with you in terms of advice for fintechs that might still be relying on a legacy connection, whether it's a screen scraping or dare I say OFX how do these, what guidance would you have for folks? 

Bill Jetter: My guidance is you have it in the bullet point here is leverage a partner who will do the heavy lifting for you. The partner is going to intermediate the complexities of getting data through different channels, whether it be an API channel or a screen scrape channel, or that old get persistent OFX channel. 

Out there and, they will have the complexities of having to acquire data through different methods and the different technologies, the knowhow, and they will harmonize everything in terms of a data warehouse on their end. And they will do the translation into an API that exposes, and gives you and delivers the benefits of an API integration to you without you having to deal directly with the nuances and challenges of having to support all these different. 

Methods. So you know that's the greatest benefit of working with we call a data access platform or aggregator. Is just the, the, they handle all the complexities. You re the benefits of all the productive productivity enhancements we just mentioned. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Yeah, I think one of the ways I think about it sometimes is that you partner with with an aggregator, a data access network, a partner to help, bring their strengths so that you can focus on what's truly in your DNA, which could be, helping me do my taxes or helping to facilitate a payment. 

I'm curious Brendan, is there advice that you would give to those trying to make the switch to smarter data access? 

Brendan Wood: Absolutely. So if you're trying to make the switch you probably already have some sort of a scraper based solution, and you're probably familiar with a lot of the the complexities with that. 

At the end of the day, screen scraping is becoming increasingly difficult. That's largely driven by two factor auth, which is like a good thing for users to protect their accounts, but it also limits the ability for you to access that in a programmatic way. There's also cap shows and other anti bot tech that's being deployed that just makes life difficult if you're scraping. 

From our experience running both scrapers and directing API integrations, we find that we end up like annihilating a lot of resources in this in like a, call it like a cat and mouse game, I guess with financial institutions when you run up against the anti bot stuff and usually it's not explicitly targeted to aggregators. 

Most of the institutions we work with are aware of what we're doing and we tell them, but it's like collateral damage. They're like we need to protect these accounts so we have all these mitigations in place and if that makes connecting accounts harder, so be it. 

Having an official API allows you to get around all of that because you don't have the same sort of antibody protection. It's all permissioned through the, the standard authentication system. Another point here is that, having users enter credentials instead of having a secure access brand, like that just creates more risk for your business, more risk for the institutions you're working with, and more risk for users. 

So it's more risk on everybody when you're sharing that data. At Snap three, we consider PII to be fairly toxic and we prefer not to collect it at all. Like we, we just keep it off the servers if at all possible. And it just keeps keeps the risk manageable for everyone. It is possible to build direct API integrations on your own.

But in order to do that, you need to have relationships and permission from the institutions. It's really hard to get that permission when you're small. So there's actually, there's real work on behalf of an institution to onboard every application who's coming and asking for permission to get on their API. 

And most institutions don't want to do that until you've already proven demand from their customers. And so you kinda have this like chicken and egg problem. How do you convince an institution to open up when you don't have any data to prove that their customers actually want the thing that you have? 

That's where working with an experienced aggregation partner to unlock access. Can help you because it can get you onboarded with larger institutions faster, and it can allow you to focus on your core competencies as a business. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Yeah. You hit on something that I think is really an important balance, is that the technology's gotta be good, but the relationship has to be there also, because building that relationship helps move everything forward. 

And I think also then it puts you in a position that you can see the long term success. Sooner, faster. It's something that from Akoya perspective, we urge folks to make these changes, to take this adoption and start it today is from that perspective. I guess Josh, from your lens also, what trends are you seeing that are influencing the next phases of API based data access? 

Josh Lockhart: Yeah, I think the biggest thing I'm pretty intently looking at is what the ultimate outcome of 1033 is. We, it kinda got codified at the end of last year, and then, I know there's a different stance with the new administration. The idea of it allows the data to be more democratized and it allows and mandates that certain. 

Certain financial institutions that don't have APIs or things like that kind of get up to speed. And that allows for even more parity and allows for more access for users and, merchants and things beyond. But really trying to make sure it really get an idea of what's gonna happen there because it's, it is gonna, it's gonna dictate for us how do we, proliferate, uses of these APIs going forward. 

Super, super interested in that and and, buckle up, 

Betsy Eisenberg: Yeah, buckle up is an interesting way to think of it. In terms of where things net out from a regulatory perspective. I think though that historically the U.S. market has very, has been very market driven in terms of getting us to the place where we are today, where it's API driven for data access. 

I don't think it's, when I think of it, it's not just a. And if it's coming, it's, when it's coming, how quickly do we do more? How do we act faster? How do we bring, all the things that you all have mentioned, greater reliability, cost savings, more trust, ease for the customer, durable connections. 

How do we start to take all of that into effect as we hit these next waves of what's coming? I think this might be a good place for us to take a pause and start to bring in a couple of the questions that we've been getting from the audience. Just a reminder to those of you who are listening in please drop in your questions as you have them into the Q&A box. 

We do have a couple of them to get started with. I'm gonna start with the first question here. And this really is, for any of the three of you to speak to is have your API strategies changed at all. As you've scaled, have you had to take different pieces, different things into consideration as you've been getting to either bigger critical mass of providers that are accessible through APIs or your user base has grown? 

Josh Lockhart: What we found is trying to get as close to the source of that data as possible has been pretty paramount. So working with partners who are also directly integrating has been a super important part. Again, it goes back to the fidelity of information again, having, the redundancy of information, just the confidence that once a user's given consent that we can pull from that account and, pull from that API as. 

As often and as, successfully as we can. Again the bigger we've gotten, the closer to that source we, we've really wanted to be. 

Bill Jetter: Yeah I think from Intuit's the, our engagement is evolving. Within Intuit, our portfolio products has grown through acquisitions and organic growth and the needs of the. 

Applications have grown for, data to power experiences. And we found this, we've been successful with getting data and it, that's always encouraged. Let's get more data and more data to power, better and more insightful experiences. And so it's a, it's an ongoing relationship with the providers of data to be willing to share additional data with us. 

And whereas, the first, I think the first generation was, let's get the data on the API. We're finding that we're investing more and let's make sure that the data is the highest quality, that it's always available for us when we need it. So the data freshness is very important. 

The ease of connections is very important and we always wanna work with our partners to see how we can raise the bar. On these me, these quality metrics, that benefit our mutual customers. And you, we find that, yeah, our partner engagement has probably increased a lot more over time as we want to make sure that the data becomes more critical to our success. 

And frankly the partner success. Success as well. 

Brendan Wood: On our end we actually started with as an API first aggregator. All of our original integrations were APIs, but we ran headfirst into the partnerships problem that I mentioned earlier, and that large institutions don't take you seriously until you have lots of their customers already demanding what you have. 

When we started implementing scrapers on our end, it was effectively an attempt to overcome that chicken and egg problem. So it's get the integrations, get the users, prove that there's value there, and then we can have real conversations with institutions to unlock proper APIs. And so that's what we're seeing and we are now transitioning away from the scraper based solutions into more API first. 

But we can do that because we have the leverage at this point and we have the relationships with the institutions. But yeah, it's very much there's an evolution started API first, then the scrapers as like an approach to get more APIs and then we continue on the path. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Are there other, I'm curious, are there other unexpected challenges that you faced through this process? 

Brendan Wood: The compliance question has been something that comes up for us constantly especially because we were, we do the trading use case, so it's not just a matter of looking at 1033. It's also you have to consider, FINRA's rules and guidance around how that sort of order execution can be delegated through APIs to other parties. 

That's. I wouldn't say it was like an unexpected problem. We knew it was gonna be one, but it's one of these things that's it's very hard to know how you're gonna resolve it until you're in the middle of it and you're actually putting programs in place with brokers and with regulators to make sure that everybody's happy, 

Betsy Eisenberg: Josh or Bill, anything to add and unexpected challenges. 

Bill Jetter: I don't know if they, anything is unexpected. I think we actually, we expect challenges to flip the question is you've been in this business long enough. You you're you're you've seen a lot of challenges and you had to deal with it. I think the biggest challenge right now is, ensuring that, there's providers out there who are willing to make the investment to, to stamp an API and they'll be looking for, solutions out there in the marketplace that reduce the cost to, improve their internal ROI on making this investment. And so I think that's gonna be the biggest challenge right now is this the ongoing, lobbying for an encouragement for the, providing, data for your customers to use, as and having happy customers who are happy to have their data with a financial institution that's willing to share their data. 

Josh Lockhart: Yeah. Yeah. I'll piggyback on Bill, but you have to love the unexpected, the love, the challenges. 

I would say one thing we've started to see is. As we become more and more of a data provider ourselves for our merchants, our customers is that they use that information in ways we didn't necessarily anticipate, or volumes and frequencies that we don't necessarily anticipate. 

Again having battle hardened partners and things like that have really helped us not, get behind the eight ball and not have architected it in a way that, would fall down with these kind of odd use cases. 

Betsy Eisenberg: We have another question here from the audience, slight shift. 

But the question is around internal team alignments. Let me pull it up here. So question is, are there what was most critical in your, in terms of how to align your teams in terms of a transition to APIs as the means for data access? 

I don't know. Bill, maybe that's a, an intuit question given the, your various legacy connections with scraping and OFX. 

Bill Jetter: Yeah I don't think there's any, there was some cha there might be some challenges in that. It's, if there's, API may be viewed as a, as a. A game changer in terms of how we get the data. 

And so if you're the new kid on the block as json API integration was several years ago. It may have been it may have been a challenge to get the troops to refocus on this is our primary source of getting the data. But it's not a big challenge, I think. I think that the challenge you have is. 

As you move to newer better technology, what do you do with the more legacy technology out there and recognizing that you may have some very large customers or important segments that are still using applications reliant on that older technology like screen scraping or OFX connections. And so I think the challenge we have is just managing the portfolio of the connections we would support. 

And where do we wanna place our investments in or maybe maintain versus grow, certain channels. And so that, that would be something that we look at an ongoing basis and I mentioned JS on API and, three to five years from now, there'll be another technology that will supplant that. 

And so it's always making sure that you don't get too wed to a current technology, but are willing to adopt something brand new that, you know. Carries you forward and gets you to the next plateau. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Great. 

Josh or Brendan, any additional comments on that one? 

Josh Lockhart: Yeah, I think on our side the biggest kind of an alignment is, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Oftentimes you, you get access to these API, you get access to this data and we want to use it for everything. And often there's a cost associated with the, that usage and just making sure we're deploying, as an internal team we make the decision that we're deploying it in the most effective places possible has really been a lot of the alignment we've come to over the years,.

Brendan Wood: Great. On our end it's the, probably the biggest team alignment question that we have that we faced in the past is do we go broad or do we go deep? And by that do we build support for as many institutions as possible, even if we have very kinda like surface level features, like very minimal functionality Or do we double down on, on specific brokers or institutions who are willing to work with us and give us the highest quality data feeds possible? 

And it's a tough question because you need both to some extent. Like you need to be broad enough in order to have a, wide enough catchment in the market to actually have a business. But you need to be deep enough to have unique offering. And us building scrapers was somewhat saying, okay, we really do need to be broad enough so that we can eventually get the deep connectivity that we need at the other brokers. 

But that was, that's probably been one of the biggest internal conversations that we've had and it keeps coming up. It's a constant every time there's a new institution that's available for us to build, it's the question of is this going too broad? Is this going deep in a place where we're not going to pick up enough connectivity to justify the cost of the build and so on. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Great. Great. Being cognizant of time we have one last question, which I think is a great way to wrap up is when measuring ROI of shifting to the T APIs, we've heard performance, we've heard user. Retention and we've had operational cost savings. I guess it's just the last question is validation. 

Is that the key metrics? Is there another, success driver here that any of you want to close this out to highlight? As we wrap up our time today, 

Bill Jetter: It's measuring happy customers. At the end of the day, happy customers are profitable customers and. That's gonna drive your RROI. 

And so you look for metrics that measure really client delight, where, and you click down below that and add it. Adding connections easily is gonna be a big delighter. Having the data available is a big delighter. And so you ch you focus on your metrics that grow customer delight and that will just drive your ROI higher at the end of the day. 

Betsy Eisenberg: I think Bill, you've said it very well. Anything, any final thoughts though, Josh or Brendan to add? 

Josh Lockhart: I think you nailed it, and I agree. 

Betsy Eisenberg: Yeah. I thank you, gentlemen for joining us today. I want to thank our audience as well. I do invite our attendees to reach out to Akoya or to our panelists. Many thanks again to the three of you for joining me today as well as our audience. 

Really appreciate everybody's time. Thank you.