The Financial Services vertical at apis.io/industries/financial-services/ tracks 125 providers and 386 APIs across seven sub-sectors: Banking, Consumer Lending, Wealth Management, Risk Management, Brokerage & Wealth Management, Investment Banking, and Asset Management.
Here is the finding that should bother anyone working in this sector: there is not a single exemplar-band provider in it.
The bands
| Band | Providers | Representative |
|---|---|---|
| Exemplar (70+) | none | — |
| Strong (60–69.9) | Verisk (60.5) | the sector ceiling |
| Developing (45–59.9) | Truist 58.9, Charles Schwab 58.8, State Street 58.5, Bank of America 58.2, BNY Mellon 57.6, TIAA 57.5 | the bulk of the sector |
| Thin (30–44.9) | Fiserv 44.8, BlackRock 42.5, Blackstone 44.5 | including the largest asset managers |
Verisk — a risk-data company, not a bank — is the highest-scoring provider in financial services at 60.5. The highest-scoring actual bank is Truist at 58.9, which is a developing score.
What the API counts say
The volume distribution is as telling as the scores. Commonwealth Bank publishes 25 APIs, Fiserv 27, Barclays 23. Meanwhile BlackRock and Blackstone — between them managing an amount of money that is difficult to write down — each publish one.
That is not a technology gap. Those firms have enormous engineering organizations. It is a posture: the API is not the product, and it is not treated as one. Compare that to the payments providers we profiled this week, where Adyen carries 202 specified APIs and an exemplar score, and the difference is strategic rather than technical.
The mandate-driven markets show up in the numbers too. Commonwealth Bank’s 25 and Barclays’ 23 reflect regimes — CDR in Australia, Open Banking in the UK — that made publishing non-optional. The US institutions clustering in the 5–15 range are operating without an equivalent forcing function.
What’s shifted
Three concrete patterns in the current data:
- Custodians outrank retail banks. State Street (58.5) and BNY Mellon (57.6) score above most consumer-facing institutions. Institutional clients demand machine-readable integration; retail customers do not.
- Brokerages are converging upward. Charles Schwab (58.8), Interactive Brokers (52.3), and TIAA (57.5) sit in a tight developing cluster — retail trading has forced a baseline.
- Infrastructure providers lag their own customers. Fiserv at 44.8 (thin) serves thousands of banks that score higher than it does.
Where to start
Browse the sector at apis.io/industries/financial-services/, or compare against payments where the scores run substantially higher.
Takeaway
386 APIs across 125 of the largest financial institutions in the world, and the ceiling is 60.5. Financial services has the resources to lead this category and currently leads nothing in it. The sector’s best API programs are at companies that sell data, not companies that hold money.