API Strategy & Practice Conference 2017

"Risky Business: How to Avoid Screen Scraping and Improve Security with API Development (Becky Heironimus and Claudia Holanda*, Capital One): Customers rely on Personal Financial Management applications for help managing and tracking their financial data securely held in multiple banks, and what’s the first thing they are asked to do? Entrust a third party with their banking credentials. That’s a risky solution, for lots of good reasons. At Capital One, we think there’s a better way: Introducing our Customer Transactions API product. As part of our DevExchange family of APIs, this product seeks to solve many of the security and privacy issues baked in to the standard operating procedures for most financial software.

For the application developer, we take on the tricky security task of handling and protecting login credentials that’s part of our normal charter, and we do it very well. We also free you from the limitations imposed by screen-scraping; you’ll never have to re-code your app because we’ve re-designed one of our UIs. And we’re normalizing account data across all account types, so as the API grows and more account types are added, you’ll have less work to do to add them to your experience.

For customer end users, we offer explicit control over their Capital One accounts, no matter how many they might have: they decide which accounts to provide access to; they decide who can access them; they decide when it’s time to change or revoke that access for one or all of those accounts. And they never have to expose their login credentials to a third party. Our API is helping redesign current practices and making them better for our customers, our developers and Capital One.

*(Second Speaker - Claudia Holanda): Claudia Holanda is a Digital Product Manager at Capital One Financial Corporation building data-driven products. Prior to Capital One, Claudia held product roles at Hobsons, United Communications Group and Information Builders. Claudia holds a B.S. in Computer Science from New York Institute of Technology. "