Working from home started as an interim response to COVID-19, but the trend likely will linger long term according to a Morgan Stanley research team. If correct, this will continue to challenge all organizations to deliver services digitally and securely through the cloud, helped immensely by application programming interfaces.
The Morgan Stanley analysis, which assessed the feasibility of working remotely for some 750 occupations, suggested roughly 40% of U.S. workers will continue working remotely in the near term and 30% of U.S. workers will remain operating from home over the next three to five years, or double the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' pre-COVID 15% estimate.
Digital ecosystems are critical for organizations to navigate workforces, supply chains, and other operational disruptions. That is why companies are increasingly turning to APIs to not only accelerate digital transformation and hasten their growth cycles, but also import more innovators outside their organizations.
To build deep and integrated digital businesses ecosystems, digital tools and processes are integral. More than half of 1,000 chief information officers in a Google Cloud/Oxford Economics study said APIs are the most critical of all; 51% of the CIOs cited them as important or very important to making their partnerships and ecosystems productive and valuable. Over half also said APIs are important to their organization’s relationships with both developers (55%) and customers (51%).
According to the survey, digital business ecosystem leaders are more likely than others to have API gateways or a centralized API management platform in place — and the vast majority expect to have a central management platform in place within three years.
Many banking industry observers expected open platforms — in which financial institutions, fintechs and third-party companies collaboratively share customer data — to eventually alter financial services as well. However, the urgency created by the coronavirus pandemic fast-tracked their digital transformation process.
A KPMG report, “A Digital Decree Reinventing the Banking Industry in Real Time,” revealed banking executives recognize that with new tech possibilities and expectations from customers, they must increasingly leverage digital technologies to expand how to serve customers, employees working from home and improve operations. “In the post-COVID world, digital desires are now digital demands.”
In the process, the traditional definition of openness expanded beyond the technological vantage point of integration and accessible APIs to become a valued strategy that embraced partnership and innovation between all industry participants.
Not too long ago, core processing and other major financial technology providers had to develop customized software integration to third-party providers requiring numerous versions and run throughs. With open APIs, an organization can quickly and easily integrate into the system.
NXTsoft’s vendor agnostic OmniConnect Platform, the premier open banking marketplace for all API needs, uses trailblazing cloud technology to link fintech solutions to financial institutions, ensuring that NXTsoft clients have the most secure and reliable integration environment in the industry. OmniConnect provides the access needed to the financial institutions information, removing integration obstacles and providing a seamless connection between third-party API solutions and financial institutions’ core digital banking, item processing and financial systems
