Why Banks Should Follow Fintechs’ Lead on Developer Portals

Fintechs didn’t just build better products over the past decade, they built better ways for developers to access them. Developer portals became a key growth lever, helping fintechs scale faster and attract top talent. Today, as banks modernize legacy systems and adopt next-generation payment technologies, they’re racing to catch up. And with real-time payments, programmable money, and agentic commerce reshaping consumers expectations, the gap is becoming harder to ignore.

A report from Javelin Strategy & Research, What Banks Can Learn From Good Vendors: Developer Lessons from Modern API Platforms, examines the state of developer portals on either side of this divide. Matthew Gaughan, the report’s lead author, says that for banks considering developer portals, “There’s a lot of upside to be had.”

Banks Are Playing Catch-Up

A robust developer portal can serve as a key distribution channel for financial products and signal a willingness to tackle challenging, high impact technology problems. They were integral to the success of many companies that have since grown into major players—like Stripe, Plaid, and Adyen—even if they weren’t explicitly branded as developer portals.

Fintechs have set the goal posts for what a good developer portal looks like. By contrast, banks have spent the past 10 to 12 years playing catch up. They’ve invested substantially in technology and made progress in some respects, but these efforts were often secondary to the business rather than a core consideration from the start.

That said, banks are learning as they go, and some are further along than others. Last year, Bank of America introduced a developer portal, though initially it was limited to healthcare payments.

“That was pretty much the extent of their APIs, and everything was related to that,” Gaughan said. “But Bank of America now is a pretty much full developer portal with detailed API reference library, with a lot of documentation and testing tools.”

Bringing In Third Parties

Developer portals are primarily outward-looking. They’re designed to reduce friction for external developers who want to integrate a specific process or workflow into their applications. A well-designed portal makes that integration easier and faster.

“Several of the banks that we looked at have developer portals where third parties could come in and create their own solutions and then be accepted into the broader ecosystem of that bank’s financial offering,” said Gaughan. “Toast, for example, does this with their broader ecosystem. If some third-party develops an outside application that could be useful for Toast, they could apply to be added into that broader ecosystem, whether that’s appearing on a handheld like POS system or in some other way, shape or form.”

They can also function as a business signal for potential API products that a bank is pushing through the portal. By building a framework with proper metrics, banks can allow internal teams to see which API calls are used most frequently. That insight can point to promising revenue-generating opportunities. At the same time, the portal can act as a distribution channel for both existing financial products and new ones as they roll out.

Keeping Up with the Technology

A number of technological advances are prompting banks to take a fresh look at their developer strategies. Agentic commerce is entering its early stages, and programmable money, such as crypto, could emerge as an important product line. In a way, developer portals become a way for banks to leverage emerging technologies while maintaining wallet share with merchants and staying top of wallet for retail consumers at checkout.

Developer portals can also signal a bank’s priorities and the degree of autonomy developers might expect when working with its technology.

“In this day and age, especially with everything going on with AI and the tech world in general, there’s a battle for talent to work on these types of solutions,” said Gaughan. “A lot of modernization and developer portals are a subset of broader tech modernization at banks, laying the foundation for what comes next.”

Banks need to be thinking ahead to what comes next. If agentic commerce takes off as many expect, it could fundamentally transform how consumers transact.

“It could have a similar effect that e-commerce did to the broader payments world,” said Gaughan. “Banks are going to be scrambling to implement certain frameworks that enable them to participate in that or meet the needs of their merchant clients.”

Benefits for Different Banks

For some banks, however, the juice may not be worth the squeeze. A smaller institution with a single product and generally satisfied customers may find that the resources required to build and maintain a developer portal outweigh the benefits.

Even so, banks of that size can still gain some exposure to the benefits of a developer community. Many smaller banks rely on core banking vendors—such as Fiserv, FIS, and Jack Henry—that offer their own versions of developer portal.

Midsize and large financial institutions, though, run a greater risk of falling behind. Developer portals increasingly act as a signal to developers of how tech-forward a company is—and, by extension, whether it’s an interesting place to work.

“It’s helpful to have access points for developers to submit a ticket or see updates to a change log if a certain API has been updated,” said Gaughan. “Building a community around the portal that you’re already putting out, whether that’s through social media channels or dedicated newsletters or chat rooms where developers could share best practices, creates a signal to other developers that this is a place that takes our work seriously.

“It’s all about laying that foundation,” he said. “If a bank’s investing a lot in technology, a developer portal is an appropriate extension of that perspective. It could potentially generate new ideas and more revenue and even new products. It’s an investment and not necessarily a top-of-the-list thing that a bank is looking to do, but they are important and a useful tool a bank could add into its belt.”

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Tags: APIBank of AmericaBanksDeveloper portalFintechs