Singapore Looks to Create an API Economy

In his opening remarks at the FinTech Conference in Singapore on November 16, Ravi Menon, managing director at MAS, said APIs are likely to be one of the most important building blocks for innovation in the future economy.

"Publishing these APIs allows financial institutions to collaborate with external users to seamlessly merge multiple data sets from different sources into an integrated rich data set, and deliver more functional and customized solutions faster and cheaper," Menon said.

He added that the central bank is actively pushing financial institutions to develop and adopt APIs.

MAS, along with the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS), recently published the "Finance-as-a-Service API Playbook," which gives guidance on common and useful APIs that financial institutions could make available. The Playbook also provides guidance for the standardization of APIs.

A set of common standards will help promote greater data sharing and interoperability, Menon added.

On November 11, the MAS launched its first set of APIs. Data is derived from its monthly statistical bulletin. Among the 12 APIs are data sets on exchange rates and interest rates.

Financial institutions that use data from MAS as benchmark data can use the APIs to minimize manual data entry. Users are also able to automate the extraction of MAS' data.

The central bank will progressively publish more data sets in the form of APIs in the coming months.