Admittedly, the world of APIs is a complex and partially hazy place where you can quickly lose sight of the overview – good reason to keep it simple in this article. So, let’s start with a clear answer to the question if the API economy is essential.

Simply said: yes – because it can not only change and improve business models but also open up new markets, increase customer satisfaction and simplify the collaboration between partners.

Or let’s put it like this:

If you want to know where the business journey of APIs is going, you must understand where we are coming from. We’ve seen exciting developments over the past few years. Companies were always good at collecting large amounts of valuable data – about their customers, products, supply chains, and more. But they weren’t always good at making the most out of it. And precisely that is the wasted chance at best and a crucial error at worst. That’s why the API economy has seen explosive growth and rapid expansion. It can unlock tremendous opportunities – for insurance companies participating in this new digital economy, for example, by offering embedded insurance products, exceptionally extending their market reach. But let’s say it in numbers: McKinsey estimates that up to 25% of personal-line premiums could be generated through embedded ecosystems by the decade’s end. For auto, that percentage could even exceed 30%.

So, while APIs make applications and their data easier to integrate, the API economy enables businesses to profit off their APIs and create business models around them. It allows your company to monetize a portion of its data and services by creating a platform for exchange. In this way, business value creation arises, which operates independently and enables the creation of new and unique applications fueling novel and innovative business models. And it doesn’t just expose your business’s internal assets to internal users, but also to business partners, third-party developers, or the public. That brings us to the point that there is a natural way for organizations to reuse, scale and broadly adopt APIs: API marketplaces.

API Marketplace – a Necessary Investment

Sure, we all know online marketplaces like Amazon or eBay, but instead of selling or buying electronics, furniture, or fashion from other users, you can do the same with APIs, granting you access to data or functionalities of IT Services – just like the apinity marketplace does for insurance-specific third-party services.

Sounds great? Yes, especially for API providers who lack visibility. With a marketplace, they have more chances to offer their API solutions to get the attention of customers from all over the world – as a public offer in a specific market segment or visible on the internal marketplaces of large organizations.

Investing in such an internal API marketplace helps companies encourage the development and usage of APIs, increase efficiency, and foster standardization. However, based on industry insights, building a first minimal viable product (MVP) in-house requires a team of around 15-20 people over a period of 18-24 months, including ongoing maintenance efforts. Therefore, purchasing a ready-to-use Software as a Service solution like apinity exchange offers a convenient alternative to immediately start participating in the booming API economy at a fairly low price.

Your Advantage with apinity? Almost Everything.

At the beginning of this article, we started with the aspect of simplicity. That is also a good point to end with. Because the primary advantage of apinity is to simplify implementation processes for you as a provider or as a consumer of APIs, you can orchestrate your API strategy across different clouds or multiple gateways and standardize your API documentation and integration processes for your developers, partners, and customers. You increase transparency and get support for contracting, billing, and operational issues. This enables your company to become a provider of third-party products yourself or even run your own branded API Shopsystem.