In my experience as a digital consultant for Google Cloud’s Apigee team, I’ve found that when a technology gets classified as “middleware,” it’s often encumbered with a scarlet letter of sorts. Business leaders find it unexciting — so much so that they often resign it to the purview of technology professionals and don’t spare a second thinking about it.

Editor’s note: Today we hear from Worldline, a financial services organization that creates and operates digital platforms handling billions of critical transactions between companies, partners, and customers every year. In this post, Wordline head of alliances and partnerships Michaël Petiot and head of API platform support Tanja Foing explain how APIs and API management enable this €2.3 billion enterprise to offer its services to partners in a wide variety of industries.

A lot of enterprises are evolving their monolithic applications into microservices architectures. In this pattern, applications are composed of fine-grained services that communicate via APIs. Microservices promise, faster development, innovation, cloud scaling, better infrastructure optimization—and happier developers. No wonder this architecture gets so much attention.

As APIs become the de facto standard for building and connecting business-critical applications, it’s important for operations teams to gain visibility into the security attributes of your APIs in order to continuously monitor and maintain the health of your API programs.

At Monex, our aim is to provide our investors with the best financial services and liberal access to capital markets. That means continually providing reliable and up-to-date services for our customers. But recently we’ve experienced issues updating our back-end system when installing new services or modifying existing ones. This led us to look into using an API, to save time and simplify the processes related to the development of new products and services.