In the last few years, financial services technology (FinTech) has completely transformed the way businesses and people manage money. Trends in FinTech are driven by innovative developers who know that Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, are the starting point for building successful financial applications. Whether a developer is looking to create an application for stock market data, banking, payments, cryptocurrency, currency exchange, funding, algorithmic trading, digital wallets, accounting, credit cards, or wealth management, they can find the APIs they need by tapping into the Financial category on ProgrammableWeb.
In this article, we highlight the 13 most popular Financial APIs according to page visits on ProgrammableWeb.
1. PayPal API
PayPal offers online payment solutions and has more than 153 million customers worldwide. The PayPal API makes powerful functionality available to developers by exposing various features of the PayPal platform. The functionality of this API includes invoice management, transaction processing, and account management.
2. Thomson Reuters Open Calais API
The Thomson Reuters Open Calais API (Intelligent Tagging API) provides developers a way to take unstructured text (news documents, research reports, etc.) and extract relevant information into a machine-readable XML/RDF format. This API provides a constant link to Thomson Reuters curated professional financial data. The API enables applications to understand the meaning of content, recognize entities, and tag accordingly. It also calculates relevance.
3. CrunchBase
CrunchBase is a directory of technology companies, people, and investment profiles primarily for internet and startup companies. The read-only Crunchbase API allows for retrieving all information that is available from the database, with some search criteria, and it uses JSON for the output formats. Access to the full API requires an enterprise or application license. CrunchBase is a product of TechCrunch, an online tech news service.
4. Stripe API
The Stripe API enables developers to accept payments online. With the Stripe application, users can keep track of payments, search past payments, create recurring charges, and keep track of customers. Some example API methods include sending invoices, accepting payments, managing subscription billing, and editing and managing account information.
5. XigniteGlobalMetals API
The XigniteGlobalMetals API offers real-time prices and quotes for metals including Gold, Silver, Palladium, Platinum and other base metals. In addition to real-time precious metals prices, the service provides daily London Fixing prices, gold coin prices, and delayed NYMEX and COMEX Future precious metal prices as well as historical precious metal prices, charts, and metal news.
6. Kiva
Kiva is a nonprofit organization that enables people to provide investment loans to entrepreneurs globally. The Kiva API gives users programmatic access to the person-to-person micro-lending website, including functions to retrieve data about loans, borrowers, lenders, media, partners, and more.
Screenshot: Kiva
7. Xero
Xero is an online accounting system designed for small businesses and their advisors. The Xero API gives users access to bank transactions, invoices, and reports through the internet or mobile devices. The API uses a RESTful approach and responds to requests in an XML or JSON format.
8. Binance API
Binance is bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange platform. The Binance API returns financial data in JSON objects or arrays. Public endpoints include market data, accounts, and user streams. Developers can use the API to create currency exchange applications and services.
9. CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index API
CoinDesk provides information services about Bitcoin and other decentralized digital currencies. One service that CoinDesk provides is the Bitcoin Price Index (BPI). This Bitcoin pricing data is calculated every minute and is published in USD, EUR, and GBP. BPI data is made available programmatically via REST API. Developers can use the API however they like as long as they credit CoinDesk as the data source.
10. Authorize.Net
Authorize.Net provides IP based payment gateway services. The Authorize.Net API enables developers to integrate digital payments into applications. It is optimized for mobile, provides PCI compliance, has iOS and Android SDKs, and stores customer payment information with digital wallet technology. It integrates with Visa Checkout, bank accounts, and PayPal, and features methods for fraud management, transaction reporting, and recurring billing.
11. FreshBooks
FreshBooks is an all-in-one small business invoicing and accounting solution. The FreshBooks API is an interface for accessing FreshBooks data using JSON. The API can be used to create web and desktop applications that integrate with an account. API methods are available to manage clients, invoices, expenses, estimates, reports, accounting and more.
12. NASDAQ Data-On-Demand API
NASDAQ provides historical stock quote data with its Data-On-Demand API. The API enables developers to implement JSON or XML formatted data from specific symbols and trading time periods into an application, analyze trends, backtest trading strategies and algorithms and build a stock quote book. The API includes calls that let users download stocks data after the markets close for pre-market analysis and request bulk data downloads.
13. Coinbase
Coinbase is an electronic service and "wallet" for bitcoins and digital currency. Users can transfer currency, pay merchants, and make other payments instantly. The Coinbase API allows developers to access and integrate the functionality of Coinbase with other applications. Some example API methods include retrieving account information and balances, sending money, requesting money, and managing user information.
If the number of APIs available in the Financial category of ProgrammableWeb is any indication, the FinTech industry has jumped all the way into the API Economy. The list above is just a tiny sampling of the more than 1800 APIs, 1000 SDKs, and 500 Source Code Samples in that category. Check out the massive list yourself.