The Soviet era left Mongolia with a legacy of manual banking processes that requires huge quantities of paperwork. This means that customers need to visit branches frequently for simple things like changing a PIN number or requesting a credit card. Since we count 2.8 million of Mongolia’s 3.3 million citizens as our customers, this could mean long lines at the bank, with an average wait time of 25 minutes for each visit. We wanted to change that.

As I work with customers around the world and across verticals, I’m struck by a common pattern: many savvy business people and technologists grasp the value of the new application programming interfaces (APIs) they’re creating for external ecosystem use cases, such as providing partners access to data or functionality, but they often see both the APIs they already have and those they build for internal use in a different light — not as software products that let developers