Financial API integration: what it is, examples, and tips

Companies stand to benefit in a variety of ways from integrating financial data, whether that’s through internal or customer-facing integrations. 

Implemented effectively, these integrations can help organizations recognize revenue faster, approve expenses more efficiently, analyze financial data more effectively, process payments quicker, and more.

To help you reap these benefits, we’ll break down common examples of financial API integrations and strategies for building them.

But first, let’s align on the definition of a financial API integration.

What is a financial API integration?

It’s any API-based integration that syncs financial data, whether that’s related to costs or revenue. These integrations can also be built between internal applications or between your product and your customers’ applications.

Related: What is a payroll integration?

What is a financial API?

To avoid any confusion, it’s worth distinguishing between a financial API and a financial API integration. The former can be an endpoint from a 3rd-party API provider, where the endpoint can help you access data related to invoices, income statements, balance sheets, or other financial data.

Related: What is an invoicing API?

Examples of financial API integrations

Here are just a few internal and customer-facing financial API integrations worth implementing.

Sync your ERP solution with your business communications platform to provide timely notifications

Your finance team likely spends more of their time working from your business communications platform (e.g., Slack) than your ERP system. 

Assuming that’s true, you can help the relevant members of your finance team become aware of key financial activities by syncing your ERP system with your business comms platform and then build the following flow: Any time a predefined event occurs in the former (e.g., new purchase order gets submitted for approval) a notification gets sent to the relevant channel in the latter (#PO-approvals).

Related: Common examples of accounting integration

Integrate your accounting system with your business intelligence platform to perform more robust analysis

Your financial systems likely lack the analytics capabilities your operations and analytics teams need to make critical business decisions. This is all the more true when considering that these systems often don’t collect tangentially-related data (e.g., employee headcount) that, combined with financial data, enables your team to make better decisions.

To help you avoid analyzing financial data in a silo and take advantage of the robust reporting capabilities of a BI tool (e.g., Tableau), you can integrate your financial systems with your BI platform and sync specific fields, like invoices, expenses, and so on.

Connect your expense management platform with your customers’ ERP systems to process payments faster

Say you offer an expense management tool—like Expensify—that allows employees to submit expenses and approvers to review and accept or reject them. 

To help your customers process approved expenses quickly, you can integrate with their ERP systems and build a sync where once an expense is marked as approved in your platform, it’s automatically added to the ERP system. 

The newly-added expense in the ERP system can include a number of populated fields around the requestor and the expense, helping the customer's finance team pay the employee quickly.

Integrate your CRM system with customers’ ERP systems to streamline invoicing

Imagine you offer a CRM system and want to help your customers invoice their clients quickly and by the correct amounts. 

To help enable this, you can offer integrations with customers’ ERP systems. Once a given connection gets established, you can build a sync where once opportunities are marked as “Closed-Won” on your platform, an associated account gets created and populated in the customer's accounting system. From there, the customer's finance team should have all of the information necessary to create and deliver an invoice to the newly-signed client.

Related: Tax rate API examples

Strategies for implementing financial API integrations successfully 

As your team looks to build financial API integrations, you can keep the following tips in mind to help guide your approach.

Note: These tips are all focused on building and supporting product, or customer-facing, integrations.

Adopt a scoring framework to prioritize financial integration requests  

Your team can’t, unfortunately, build every financial integration within a given period of time. This means you’ll need to pick the integrations that get built within the coming months and which get pushed to your backlog.

To help you pinpoint the integrations you should build sooner rather than later, you can adopt a scoring framework that assesses each financial integration opportunity objectively.

For instance, you can use criteria like the number of customers requesting an integration, the average size of customers requesting the integration, and the level of difficulty to build the integration. For each of these criteria, you can assign scores for specific ranges and then add up the scores for each integration.

Once you’ve done this for all the integrations you’re evaluating, you can identify the most lucrative opportunities.

Implement a go-to-market strategy before launching a financial integration

The success of your financial integrations largely depends on the go-to-market strategies that underpin them.

This requires thinking through and aligning on the following areas:

• Pricing: How should a given financial integration be priced if purchased as an add-on? And/or should it be included in a specific plan?

• Support: Who, if anyone, can support the integration? What type of SLA can we give for resolving specific integration issues? And what documentation can we build to offer self-serve support?

• Marketing: What marketing activities should we invest in to drive awareness of the integration? This can be anything from social posts to webinars to blog posts to ads

• Sales enablement: How should sales reps talk about and demo the integration? And how can we train our reps to do this successfully?

Related: All the resources you need to take your integrations to market successfully

Leverage a unified API solution for customer-facing financial integrations

A unified API solution lets you offer several financial integrations from a single API integration build, allowing you to support your customers’ financial integration needs quickly.

Moreover, through Merge, the leading unified API solution, you’ll get access to Integration Observability features that let your customer-facing teams manage your integrations; advanced features to access and sync custom objects and fields; and integration maintenance support through its team of partner engineers.

You can learn more about using Merge to add and maintain customer-facing financial integrations by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.