Financial IT (FIT) has been both late and slow in making the transition to this key technology that powers much of the rest of the digital economy, so it’s great news that the adoption and use of APIs is now on the rise. But, as more of FIT moves to leveraging APIs, Cascade FinTech stays at the forefront with our progressive approach to high quality APIs.

We believe great APIs should be robust, reliable, secure, agile and fast. These qualities animate our philosophy and are embedded in our products. As demonstrated in other industries, high quality APIs are rapidly and widely adopted leading to a rapid rise in API quantity. More importantly, they enable a more efficient approach to innovation, both internally with among our clients.

Here’s why Cascade’s APIs are the right choice on which to build your new debit or prepaid program.

Great APIs are robust. They provide the data and functionality that FIT developers and end-users actually need to build better products and services. They are broad-based rather than narrowly tailored and provide lots of functionality. They support real-time, bi-directional (read and write) data exchange between applications.

In the case of APIs for payment card integration, ours are built as they should be -- agnostic -- meaning they work the same way regardless of the partner involved. By contrast, partner-specific APIs, whether they are vendor supplied or one of the many flavors of FIT being deployed by those vendors, lead to a tower of babel of incompatible APIs and are highly inefficient.

Our robust APIs are also easy to deploy and maintain. Installation packages are automated as much as possible so that developers can avoid dependencies that slow or complicate deployment. Cascade FinTech’s robust APIs do not depend on legacy technologies as this “drags forward” all the limitations and problems of these older technologies. After all, one key reason FIT is moving towards APIs is the need to move away from these limited, outdated approaches.

Our API’s reliability reflect both the developer’s knowledge and the care with which they we have developed them. The hallmarks of reliable APIs are that they are stable and have solid error-handling. At Cascade FinTech, we think of stability and error handling as going hand-in-hand. Well-designed APIs are highly stable. They...Just...Work.

But nothing is perfect, so our great API’s and our knowledgeable developers focus on error-handling too! We know that detecting errors and providing that information to consuming applications applies a “belt and suspenders” approach to reliability. We address the paradox of designing them well in the first place while acknowledging that failure will still occur and should be handled gracefully.

Security has never been more important in FIT and Cascade FinTech’s APIs address key security concerns. We use a combination of application keys and user credentials for identity management and verification in real-time for every API call.

APIs must be stateless which allows for designs that do not retain copies of the sensitive data (like personal health information) that flow through them, thus eliminating tempting targets for hackers. Our APIs leverage end-to-end encryption and other features of secure web services to further safeguard your data and your customers’ data.

A great advantage of our APIs is that they are far easier to modify and extend than traditional methods of FIT data exchange. Too much of traditional financial development is still mired in the “waterfall” approach to development, which has been largely abandoned by IT developers in other industries. But simply moving to APIs does not necessarily create agility.

For example, agile standards like Scrum, Crystal & Kanban can take years to deploy new capabilities or revise existing ones. While the dream of a single standard is enticing, the reality is that reaching consensus is time consuming and results in all kinds of compromises. By its very nature, this approach will never be agile. The Cascade FinTech platform serves as a technology backbone for whatever agile methodology your team uses. Cascade FinTech inherently also provides support for CI/CD tools and approaches such as Maven, Jenkins and Travis.

Commercial APIs delivered by Cascade FinTech are highly agile. They are far more market-driven and respond rapidly to new or changing requirements. Agility is built-in from the ground up starting with the choice of development platform, supported by robust design and agile development processes and driven forward by constant feedback from customers. They succeed by meeting customer demands and beating their competitors.

The greatest API in the world won’t change financial IT if it is not also economically sound. This applies to both the development and use of APIs. The ready availability of proven API development tools combined with agile development processes sets the stage for efficient and economical development and maintenance of APIs. We’ve engineered this into our own API generation process.

All Cascade FinTech API services are described with relevant updates with each and every deploy. Cascade leverages tools such as SWAGGER that ensure a central and up-to-date centralized location for all descriptions, definitions and features. This also provides for immediate new functionality descriptions and the ability to sandbox test methods directly within the documentation environment. This enables Team collaboration, sharing, style guide enforcement and lifecycle integration.

It is clear that when it comes to APIs, quality is exceedingly important. Our Cascade Cloud API services are highly tested from many different vantage points. All of the Cascade FinTech services stack must pass code standards that meet and exceed all compliance testing for OWASP (top 25) and SANS CWE (top 50). Independent peer review is performed with every build & deployment and all systems are monitored 24-7 for performance. The elastic architecture of the Cascade FinTech environments enable a consistent experience from reliability to performance.

Getting started with Cascade is easy. Let’s talk and see how we can work together to build the card program you need. Just Ask.

Getting started with Cascade is easy. Let’s talk and see how we can work together to build the Prepaid Program you need. And if you need something different than what you see here, it's no problem. Just Ask.

PO Box 81888Las Vegas, NV 89180-1888

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