From connectivity to capability: How J.P. Morgan is evolving APIs from connectivity products to platform enablers

The payments industry has always been a technology-driven business, serving as a testing ground for new technologies that often find a lasting place within the sector.  

Over the past two decades, we've witnessed the maturation of peer-to-peer payments (P2P), the hype and rationalization of blockchain, the rise of real time payments (RTP) (driven by the gig economy and e-commerce), data harmonization efforts, Financial Market infrastructure upgrades, and innovations in card schemes that continue to dominate retail payments. The rapid growth of the gig economy and regulatory changes are major drivers of these transformations. All of these have been fueled by new technologies or established technologies applied in novel ways. 

In this article, we will discuss how APIs—a technology that has been around for decades—are transforming the cash management and broader payment space, and how J.P. Morgan is evolving the use of APIs from traditional connectivity products to broader platform-based capabilities that deliver cash management and merchant acquiring services.

The maturity curve of API adoption

Throughout the past several years, companies have adopted APIs for banking and cash management purposes in four loosely-defined phases:

• Phase 1: Initially, banks adopted a more modular approach to building payment systems, moving away from legacy, monolithic systems to more modular architectures where functionally specialized systems communicated through APIs. This effective use of APIs connected internal banking systems and services, ultimately leading to the externalization of some of these APIs.
• Phase 2:  J.P. Morgan and other industry participants began exposing APIs to clients primarily for instructing payments and accessing balance data. Regulations like PSD2 (effective in 2016) and similar initiatives provided the initial impetus for adopting APIs as a connectivity channel to distribute some banking and payment services.
• Phase 3:  Over time, financial institutions began developing APIs to support more advanced capabilities and in response to client demand across payments and banking. To meet this demand, we invested in modern API infrastructure to deliver state-of-the-art technology that enables clients to access our products. As early adopters of an API-first approach, especially for solutions such as embedded banking, RTP, and Validation Services, we recognized the need for real-time connectivity and built our strategy around it.
• The Future: There remains significant opportunity to unlock the full potential of APIs. A powerful way for us to realize this is by enabling our clients to fully leverage the API ecosystem, allowing them to access our platforms to build compelling products and services using our API stack, facilitated by our developer tools stack. More on this in the following sections.

Client-centric benefits of APIs

For clients, the value of APIs isn’t in the interface itself, but the outcomes they unlock, the ease of integration, and how simply the technology can be consumed. The platform-based approach can help all types of clients, regardless of where they are in their API journey:

• Speed and Agility: Near real-time access to data and services allows treasuries to better manage their cash, liquidity, FX, and credit exposures. Quicker access to transaction and balance details enables quick decision-making and optimized use of intraday liquidity.
• Cohesive Integration: APIs let clients integrate payment capabilities directly into their platforms—whether ERP systems, marketplaces, or treasury systems. J.P. Morgan also works proactively with major ERP and TMS providers to pre-integrate our payment capabilities within these platforms, eliminating the need for extensive tech builds and integrations.
• Customization: Enables clients to build products for their own clients or create experiences that suit their workflows, rather than adapting to banking interfaces.
• Co-Creation: Enables co-creation, as some clients want to partner with banks to build unique solutions—API platforms must support that innovation.

In short, the platform future of APIs isn’t just technically sound—it must be flexible, discoverable, and strategic.

Strategic direction for banks

To address evolving client needs and fully embrace the future, banks and the wider industry could leverage platform thinking for APIs, where these platforms function more like operating systems than catalogs of API documentation. They could deliver a superior DevX, provide tools for co-creation and frictionless integration, and include:

• Developer Portals: Offering rich documentation, developer experiences, test environments, use case guidance, and support channels.
• Partner Integration Hubs: Allowing third parties to connect, test, and go to market faster.
• Developer Tools and API Best Practices: Providing sample code, examples of calls, and best practices for building efficient integrations.
• Data-Driven APIs: Delivering analytics, insights, and even recommendations, not just raw data.

Our new developer portal is a flagship platform in our journey to achieve this direction. We’re also investing in upgrading the overall API infrastructure and processes to streamline API builds and maintain robust product management discipline with DevX and CX at the core. We envision a future built on a composable platform that enables collaboration, co-creation, and innovation with our clients, partners, and prospects, where they can discover, test, and build with our APIs.

Another important aspect of this future is the overall industry’s evolution within the API space to enable standardization and harmonization, enhancing the overall experience and efficiency for payments users across the industry. At J.P. Morgan, we continue to advocate for industry-level efforts to achieve this for our clients and other users of banking services.

Governance and trust as enablers of scale

As banks scale their API offerings, strong governance frameworks become critical. At J.P. Morgan, we have dedicated teams to ensure robust product management and governance principles are applied throughout the lifecycle of delivery and availability of our capabilities. Some of these include:

• Standardized API Design Principles: Ensuring consistency across the bank’s services, reducing development costs during integration or co-creation phases, and improving compute efficiency when using multiple services, products, or APIs.
• Versioning and Lifecycle Management: Helping reduce risk during updates and rollouts.
• Security, Access Control, and Auditability: These must be intrinsic in all capabilities of the API platforms of the future.

Governance doesn’t slow innovation; if done right and built within the right processes, it enables it at scale by ensuring APIs are secure, dependable, and future-proof.

The Future of Banking APIs: Intelligent, Composable, Platform-Based

As discussed earlier, looking ahead, we see three defining shifts in the API landscape:

• APIs as a Platform: Banking services will increasingly be consumed outside the bank as part of a wider, potentially client-run ecosystem. These platforms must support evolving client needs, enabling co-creation, seamless integration, customization, data-driven APIs, and superior DevX.
• Composable Capabilities: APIs will be modular and stackable, allowing clients to build custom workflows and solutions.
• Intelligent APIs: With AI integration, APIs will go beyond data access, offering predictive insights, anomaly or fraud detection, and adaptive responses.

With these shifts, there is potential for APIs to power and enable new use cases where payments are embedded within other services (client's products) and client treasuries to incorporate cash management within the company's workflow. 

To achieve this future, partnerships between fintechs, tech companies, and banks may become necessary, and banks will potentially need to collaborate to drive standardization of API standards, lowering the cost of adoption, integration, and operation for users of payments and banking services. Various industry forums and bodies can be leveraged to drive these collaborations.

Explore the Payments Developer Portal to see how we’re providing developers with the tools to build for the future of payments.