Happy Holidays from your API friends! This month we celebrate together virtually with our last API news roundup of the year. Here is your look at the top API stories for December 2020.

The New Normal

Healthcare Cyberthreats: An API-First Approach To Protection

COVID-19 is pushing the U.S. healthcare system to the brink. Amid a global pandemic, healthcare infrastructure is being tested — from hospitals at full capacity to personal protective equipment (PPE) in short supply.

Just as the number of virus cases started climbing to new levels, the U.S. government issued an alert about “an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers.” The advisory warned healthcare organizations to make sure to take “timely and reasonable precautions to protect their networks from these threats.”

Read the Forbes article.

Episode 5: Business Continuity and the Remote Work Revolution

Open Banking

The Open Banking API Security Imperative

The second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) in Europe, which requires banks to open their payment services to third parties via a series of APIs, has enabled a range of new Fintech products that make it easier for consumers and businesses to manage their finances.

Meanwhile, in North America, there is a drive to adopt a newer, common data-sharing standard within banks and Fintech firms that can support interoperability, security, and privacy, called Financial Data Exchange (FDX).

This standard is designed to deprecate the older data-sharing standard, Open Financial Exchange (OFX). Both PSD2 and FDX are available as an Open API Specification and the institutions are required to implement it on their own.

Read the full article.

Nordigen introduces free European open banking API

Latvian Fintech startup Nordigen is switching to a freemium model thanks to a free open banking API. Open banking was supposed to democratize access to banking information, but the company believes banking aggregation APIs from Tink or Plaid are too expensive. Instead, Nordigen thinks it can provide a free API to access account information and paid services for analytics and insights services.

Read the TechCrunch article.

Enabling open finance through APIs

Security

#WebSummit: Common API Security Risks and How to Mitigate Them

Speaking during the online Web Summit 2020, Daniele Molteni, firewall product manager at Cloudflare, discussed the most common security threats for API traffic and outlined strategies for identifying vulnerabilities and defending critical infrastructure.

Read the full article.

Third-Party APIs: How to Prevent Enumeration Attacks

When organizations use APIs – the next frontier in cybercrime – to engage with third parties, it’s crucial they understand the associated security exposure they’re introducing.

To do so, they must think like a hacker to evaluate whether or not they are introducing a problem or a solution for their customers and their organization.

From there, they can move forward by pursuing options that both create a seamless experience for customers, while at the same time protecting critical data.

Read the full article.

Social Media APIs

Facebook’s alleged use of APIs to crush competition is a warning to other data companies

Business of APIs

From startups to Starbucks: The embedded API opportunity

Stripe recently made headlines with its entrance into the banking world with Stripe Treasury. The news follows Google’s banking and payments announcement along with IPO-bound companies such as Airbnb, DoorDash, and Affirm all mentioning “financial services” in S-1 filings — a clear signal of how the sector will continue to stay red hot for the coming years.

Read the TechCrunch article.

Thank you for reading our API News roundup — December 2020. We’ll see you next month with more API headlines.