Yorkshire Building Society
As one of the largest building societies in Britain, Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) provides financial services both directly and through a 143-strong branch network and 99 associated agencies across the UK. YBS focus on offering consistently competitive mortgage and savings rates and products which are targeted towards members’ needs.
YBS Developer Portal
Yorkshire Building Society’s API journey started in 2016 when the PSD2* regulation entered into force. One of the key requirements of the regulation is to make technical documentation available to 3rd parties. Looking for a solution that integrated well into their API capability it was quickly identified that a Drupal based Developer Portal would meet not only the immediate needs but grow alongside the organisation as it’s API capability matured.
*PSD2 (Payment Service Directive) is a 2013 EU regulation that aims to enhance consumer protection, facilitate innovation and set high security standards in the payments market.
The Project: Migration and Drupal Upgrade
In 2019 Apigee announced that they would no longer sponsor the hosting of Drupal 7 developer portals, initiating a year long grace period for migration to a new hosting platform. For YBS this was an opportunity to not only implement a core upgrade of the platform to Drupal 8, but also simplify the support model and introduce an improved developer experience.
2020 brought its own challenges as Covid-19 spread across the world, requiring new ways of working and collaborating. Despite the geographical separation, both YBS and Pronovix were able to continue the migration using Slack, email and conference calls to ensure the project was delivered on time and without compromise.
The New YBS Devportal
The new site is designed to help developers securely integrate YBS and Chelsea payment accounts into products and services by using industry standard Open Banking APIs.
Additionally, the site serves as the primary support channel for YBS APIs, featuring answers to commonly asked questions, a ‘getting started’ guide and has been enhanced with downloadable Postman files with example responses for rapid development.
This documentation provides an easy to follow overview of all the essential information developers need to understand the capabilities of APIs provided by YBS.
In addition to the detailed reference documentation pages, the sites FAQ page covers the most frequently asked questions by developers with an embedded support form where users can submit issues directly. The site now has a more developer friendly look and feel, and the developer portal’s design is visually aligned with the YBS brand design.
Future plans
YBS have already started extending its catalogue to include easily accessible private/internal APIs with self-registration functionality, ensuring that APIs are easily discoverable across the organisation.
With Open Finance starting to gather momentum in the UK, APIs are an essential part of the financial ecosystem and YBS are well positioned to respond as we enter a new era of financial connectivity.
