The finance industry is witnessing a greater adoption in terms of technology over the past few years. Innovative technologies such as financial APIs are amongst them that businesses of all sizes have begun leveraging.
And why not!
Financial APIs can help developers connect to their applications and platforms quite easily and accelerate time to market. In turn, they also offer a seamless experience to your customers who expect fast, responsive and secure data access from your applications.
It’s a win-win situation for all if you use an efficient financial API to build your digital products.
But what are they exactly, and what all options do you have in the market?
Let’s find out the answer to all these questions, and more so you can choose the best financial APIs to develop quality applications.
What are Financial APIs?
Finance APIs are software that can communicate with financial apps to facilitate data access, payment processing, and transactions. Financial platforms and institutes utilize these APIs to enhance user experience, simplify integration, and enable smooth collaboration between financial partners.
A finance API aims to allow users to access financial information whenever they want with a few clicks. It also enables seamless data sharing between the apps for users, business partners, 3rd-party vendors, and employees. Financial APIs fill the gaps between distinctive apps and synchronize data across different apps. They can connect to legacy financial apps and collect data from them by getting inbound requests. Next, they process the requests, access the requested data, and send the response.
Why use Financial APIs?
Leveraging APIs can help traders and businesses connect financial apps, access data, and build products faster. There are many more benefits to it. Here’s a detail on how financial APIs can help you.
Speed
Financial APIs help accelerate the application development time, which is one of the major reasons businesses use them. You can quickly create, optimize, and deploy your products faster using a secure and open API. It’s more efficient than building an app in-house by writing code from scratch. Instead, you can use APIs to kick start the product development and get to the market quickly before the competitors. This process of applications can save a lot of money, time, and effort.
Efficient data management and security
Accessing quality data securely and consistently with appropriate user permissions is not only cool but also necessary when it comes to financial apps. Using a secure financial API, you can enable robust security like permission-based access to accounts and transactions. It offers bank-level protection and allows you to manage your data effectively for easy regulatory reporting and compliance.
Superb connectivity and insights
You can easily connect a financial API to financial applications, accounts, and transactional data and perform the necessary financial tasks without hassles. It offers better functionality, value, and seamless experience to users to perform a variety of tasks such as banking digitally, money management, payment processing, account verification, etc.
In addition, you can integrate data analytics easily in your app using APIs to gain deeper insights into your customers’ behavior. It can include information like spending patterns and trends by geographical locations, stores, merchants, etc. It will help you map your customers’ needs and expectations and shape your offerings accordingly.
Real-time data access
The craze for online shopping and banking is increasing rapidly amongst users, and so is the need for quality and responsive apps to meet this demand. Hence, it would help if you produced apps that can function superbly anywhere and at any time on different types of devices.
You can enable this using a financial API while building your application. It will help the users quickly access data in real-time, connect to their accounts, view available balances, complete transactions, view transaction history, and so on. It can also offer effortless account verification for loans, opening accounts, selling or buying stocks, shopping online, etc.
Enhanced user experience
Modern customers are advanced; they expect an effortless experience using an application or service. There’s hardly any room for hassles as things have become more streamlined and accessible with the advancing technology.
Using financial APIs in your applications allows you to do just that. Instead of spending more time on writing codes, use the APIs and focus more on delivering user experience through innovation. You can provide users with a more responsive and personalized experience by combining financial services such as products, banking data, online payment data, etc., on the application.
This helpful, user-friendly, secure, and streamlined user experience will draw their attention and keep them engaged with your application.
You can understand how useful financial APIs can be for your business by looking at the benefits above. Therefore, it makes sense to integrate some of the existing APIs to build your financial products. And we have some excellent recommendations for you so you can choose the best financial APIs based on your needs.
Check them out!
Financelayer
Financelayer is a real-time API for financial news that uses JSON payload to get dynamic financial data. With the single integration, you can connect with more than 100 financial markets and receive many data stock quotes.
Embed live finance news on any application or website along with article feeds. You can also gain access to company financials, government economic reports, stock quotes, and more in a structured format. It also covers all the information, from historical data to real-time news.
The news API supports any server-side and client-side programming language such as Python, JQuery, Ruby, Go, and PHP. It is equipped with more than 100 pre-written codes, which helps you get started in minutes.
Get 250 calls/month, all news sources, 3 months news history, information on delayed news, and more entirely free. You can also choose a paid plan to get up to 1000 API calls/month and 1-year news history at $59.99/month and $47.99/month if billed annually.
Marketstack
Marketstack is an easy-to-use and free REST API interface that delivers global stock market data in JSON format. You can obtain real-time data for ticker down to the minute and request quotes or gain 30 years of historical market data.
Integrate the API with your financial products easily and make use of more than 170,000 worldwide stock tickers that are collected from 70 worldwide exchanges, including NYSE, Nasdaq, and more.
Marketstack guarantees uptime close to 100%, and you will get real-time market data, intraday market data, 750 market indices, and a lot more. It is powered by scalable cloud infrastructure and cutting-edge technology that is capable of handling anything from hundreds of requests every month to millions per day.
Every byte and bit is secured with industry-standard 256-bit HTTPS encryption. In addition, extensive documentation will help you get set to go within minutes with the help of code examples and interactive demo requests.
Get it for free or pay $9.99 every month to get 10,000 requests/month, 70 exchanges, 10 years of history, market indices, HTTPS encryption, and more.
There are more Stock Market data APIs you can explore.
Coinlayer
Know the real-time cryptocurrency exchange rates quickly in JSON format with Coinlayer’s Rest API covering more than 385 coins and 25 exchanges. The API is backed by highly available and solid cloud infrastructure in order to deliver your data in milliseconds.
Coinlayer ensures you will get the highest level of accuracy as a series of reliable exchange providers power the crypto rates. It also encrypts all the responses and requests with 256-bit HTTPS encryption. Additionally, you will get historical data for about 10 years and see how cryptocurrencies have been developed over time.
Furthermore, Coinlayer will supply consistent information whenever you need it. The developers have designed the API by keeping consistency, ease of use, and performance in their minds to deliver the best user experience. Use it with a RESTful response and request, and interactive and extensive documentation.
Coinlayer offers a response time as low as 20 milliseconds. With the integration guide, you will also get a chance to learn more. Whether you are a large corporation, SMB, or freelancer, Coinlayer API has everything for you to have the complete data.
Get Coinlayer for free with 100 requests every month, hourly updates, and historical data. Else, you can try a paid version to access more at just $9.99/month with extended results, SSL encryption, and conversion endpoint.
CoinMarketCap
CoinMarketCap has a professional API that offers you a new suite of flexible, accurate, and robust cryptocurrency market data endpoints. It lets you backtest the trading and run simulations along with investing strategies by using the crypto data.
Every time you search for exchange data, you will get the perfect picture with the aggregated data from thousands of coins and hundreds of exchanges. You will also have complete visibility of all the cryptocurrency data from up to 5 years. With CoinMarketCap’s API, you can supply your users with the correct data on the market.
Its updated and advanced market data also helps you build new media offerings, portfolio management tools, wallets, and more. Get deep insights on past and current pricing, exchange info, and volume to make the correct decisions at the right time. With the set of data collected, you can build quality apps that can enhance users’ interest and boost engagement.
CoinMarketCap comes with a free API key with limited benefits. Take advantage of more features at $29/month if billed annually.
Webhose
Get up-to-the-minute, comprehensive coverage of news and news API data feeds with Webhose, the best alternative to Google News API. You will get unified, structured, and aggregated data in XML and JSON formats from over 1 million websites.
Webhose News API gives you direct access to Live Data from various news sites. It also offers you filters with the options entities, sentiment, archived data, and social signals. Additionally, you can run queries about locations, organizations, and persons and charge your analytics and research with the historical data.
Improve your risk modeling and predictive analytics through back data and gain insight into entities, persons, and companies with the help of financial analysis. You can also find fruitful opportunities in the market from competitor product pricing, online reviews, and news.
Build better and valuable artificial intelligence models through various data. Access all the stories you will collect and gain complete insight into your brand to monitor it in real-time. Webhose also uses sources like forums, radio stations, news articles, and blogs to provide you with perfect data.
You can explore more Global News APIs here.
Crypto APIs
Use the most reliable SaaS that allows you to build Crypto and Blockchain applications with more security, ease, and speed using Crypto APIs. It offers many products, including wallet as a service, blockchain data, blockchain events, blockchain automation, blockchain tools, and market data that help in every developmental stage.
The API supports many tokens, exchanges, standards, layers, and blockchains. It monitors the market constantly for new data every time so that you stay ahead of the competition. You will also get enterprise-grade security to encrypt all sensitive data, memory, and REST.
Get unified data that you would need to integrate only once for crypto exchanges and blockchain protocols to save tremendous efforts. The API also uses microservices architecture, which is cloud-based and uses Kubernetes for auto-scaling.
Crypto APIs can serve 5000 requests per second without any change in response time. You will also get access to SDKs and libraries in your preferred programming languages. Generate code samples quickly along with additional SDKs and use all the products of Crypto APIs for free with some limitations that you will not find in paid subscriptions.
Polygon.io
Polygon.io is the financial market data platform for forex, crypto, stock APIs, and more. It provides historical and real-time stock data APIs for US stocks from US-based stock exchanges and dark pools.
Receive tick-by-tick updates on 1000 currency pairs from the leading banking institutions. Additionally, you will get historical and real-time crypto data from leading crypto exchanges in one API. You will also find trades, quotes, tickers details, stock splits, market status, and a lot more in a single application.
Moreover, you can create the application in your preferred programming language with no Java or C limitations. Instead of spending more time on integration, dedicate it to creating the apps using technology and gaining sample codes to run in Nodejs, C#, Python, and more on Github.
Moreover, the structured JSON RESTful APIs allow you to request by using coding language. It also maintains ultra-low latency APIs of less than one millisecond. Polygon.io is a fast, reliable, and accurate API that lets you build powerful visualizations for any operating system or platform in the language you know.
Get 5 API calls/minute, 2 years of historical data, aggregate bars, reference data, corporate actions, and more for free. Gain more features and benefits at $19/month.
Alpha Vantage
Alpha Vantage provides stock APIs in Excel, Google, JSON sheets, forex data feeds, cryptocurrency data feeds, over 50 technical indicators, and global coverage. It comes with cutting-edge technology, rigorous research, and unwavering accessibility to financial data.
Take a test drive of the API library with Alpha Vantage’s API documentation. When you are ready, claim your free key and explore more. It supports many programming languages, including NodeJS, PHP, Python, C#/.NET, and more. It will cover more than 20 years of historical data you need for your applications.
You can use the search endpoint to get information like market data and matching symbols based on your chosen keywords. Register yourself for lifetime access and use Alpha Vantage for free by giving accurate information about you.
Trading Economics
Download many rows of historical data, query real-time economic calendars, and subscribe to the updates with Trading Economics API. It provides historical prices and live quotes for stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies. Use it to access historical data and current figures on 20 million indicators for 196 countries.
You will find proprietary predictions for markets and indicators and get the benefit of open source where you can use any programming languages of your convenience, including R, NodeJS, Java, PHP, C#, Python, etc. You can also receive data on national statistics directly from official sources.
Moreover, you will get data like currencies (from 150 currencies and 29000 exchange rates), stocks, bonds, world bank, comrade, FRED, and commodities (like metals, livestock, industrial things, energy, and agriculture).
Get Trading Economics API at just $49/week or $199 monthly and avail yourself with one week trial. You can also avail of discounts on quarterly and yearly plans.
Conclusion
Financial APIs are handy for developers to build faster, responsive, and secure applications. It will help you provide an excellent user experience, enable efficient data management, and offer lots of other benefits. It’s not only helpful for businesses but also for your customers. Thus, choose a financial API from the above list based on your needs and build outstanding financial products.
