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Trade credit insurance is rapidly evolving from manual to automation, and we are driving this positive change.
At Euler Hermes we assess the financial health of over 83 million companies worldwide, and price over 10 million transactions every month, all within milliseconds, anytime, anywhere.
Clients expect a seamless experience when using our trade credit insurance products.
So, by putting APIs at the heart of our architecture, we make it simpler for you to integrate us into your own tooling and business processes.
We create APIs with three objectives in mind:
- We put the users at the heart of our design. Not the CFO or procurement manager, but the developers and fellow business analysts who integrate our APIs back into their company’s software and business processes.
- We give you the tools, resources, and access to get moving quickly: for example, a sandbox with a working environment, documentation, technical support, and API keys.
- Most of the new applications are based on REST APIs, which connect back-end apps with the front end, giving you easy access to our portals.
We clearly document all our APIs as swaggers in a company-wide API catalogue that we keep with a sandbox of test data. You can then self-service 24/7, and integrate our APIs into your own software.
APIs are everywhere in the company, and with thousands of companies accessing our platforms for information on themselves or their customers, access checks are robust.
We base our whole identity management on oAuth2 and use JWT tokens to check credentials and grant access at the AWS API Gateway level for a first level security check. A dedicated resource manager acts as the second level.
We have strict standards and non-functional requirements in place for our APIs and we develop with Lambda functions so we can automatically scale at will.
All of our APIs have a dedicated health-check API - plus, an SLA for every API is agreed with all the teams.
Calls to our APIs are logged and traced.
Our logs are made non-repudiable thanks to the blockchain, and API calls are traced and correlated for behavioral analyses as well as performance management.
For monitoring the performance and logs, our IT teams use Prometheus and Grafana. All the logs generate dashboards in real-time and are sent to splunk to create dashboards and security alerts.
The impact of Euler Hermes APIs has been immense.
Firstly, we’ve quickly introduced new products at a marginal cost by recombining APIs. This allows us to test the market appetite for these new products, then kill or introduce new ones.
And secondly, by building products with our end-users and developers in mind. We’ve empowered our business analysts.
They don’t just design screens anymore, but API swaggers too. This has become second nature now and the collaboration with our developers is awesome.
What are we doing next and what’s in it for you?
Right now, we’re unifying our data environments together with our API environments.
This means objects such as an insurance policy, company information, a claim, or an invoice can be pulled from our backend systems and shared both through our APIs as well as to our Analytics teams.
But we also orchestrate our services horizontally through an event-based architecture of microservices.
We call this North South vs East West communication.
Next, we’ll look at GraphQL to challenge our existing API structure, this will make it more efficient in retrieving specific data for you in real-time.
Developer experience is key for us too, so in the future, it will be easier for you to get up and running: play, test, and get creative.
We’re also building a dedicated developer portal where we can share all our functional and technical documentation, API keys, and release notes.
Because at Euler Hermes, we’re always moving forward on our API journey.