Open banking and API-based payment solutions are quickly transforming how consumers and businesses interact with financial services. As financial institutions increasingly seek to meet customers where they are, the technical infrastructure that enables seamless, secure payment systems is now more important than ever.
Rahul Sharma is at the forefront of this revolution as an expert in API product management for the banking and payments industry. With a foundation in IT engineering, finance education, and extensive experience developing API products across multiple payment networks, Rahul has played a pivotal role in advancing technologies like real-time payments (RTP), FedNow, and Push to Card services.
Rahul has managed complex API products from conception through scale, building systems that process millions of transactions. His recent work leverages generative AI to enhance developer experiences, provide intelligent support, and optimize operational efficiency for API products.
We sat down with Rahul to discuss how open banking is transforming financial services, the challenges of balancing innovation with regulatory compliance, and his vision for the future of payment technologies. From creating exceptional developer experiences to implementing AI-driven support solutions, Rahul shares valuable insights gained from years at the intersection of banking, technology, and product management.
You’ve been working in API product management for the banking and payments industry for several years. What initially drew you to this specialized field?
My educational background and my passion for building great products that delight customers were the key reasons. My bachelor’s in IT engineering and my initial work experience as a java developer is where I built the foundation for my technical knowledge that is needed for managing technically complex products like APIs. After my MBA in finance I gravitated towards product management and solving customer problems. Post my mba I gained experience as a business analyst and product manager in the banking and payments industry. The right blend of technical and product knowledge and skills set is what brought me to this specialized field.
You’ve led API-based embedded payments products across various payment networks. Can you tell us about the most significant challenges you’ve faced in scaling these products from concept to widespread adoption?
Balancing risk controls with growth has been one of the key challenges. Banking is an industry where you cannot work like a hyper growth start up, it requires you to have a guarded approach for scaling your products. Another challenge I have faced is to get customers to use APIs for completely new payment methods that are not yet as mature as some of the more established payment methods like credit cards or ACH. Customers are used to file based channels for sending payments to banks. Managing internal stakeholders like risk officers, sales staff and customer support staff has been another challenge.
The financial services API landscape has evolved dramatically in recent years. How do you approach building products that balance innovation with the strict security and compliance requirements of the banking industry?
It requires a unique approach to product planning and prioritisation where you factor in regulatory compliance work in your product roadmap. Regulatory compliance work is important that keeps the product hygienic and ready to build innovative features. Failing to keep up with it can take your product back several months or years. Collaborating with risk officers to build risk controls and compliance features without compromising on innovation is immensely helpful.
Open banking is transforming how financial institutions operate. From your perspective, what are the most exciting opportunities this revolution presents for businesses and consumers?
It’s an exciting time for businesses and consumers. There is a paradigm shift happening in how they bank. Banks want to meet the customers where they are, and embed banking in other digital experiences. Customers no longer are obliged to perform banking tasks in the banking mobile app or website. Thanks to open banking APIs, consumers are banking today from neo bank apps, digital wallets, e commerce apps and social media. Businesses are able to bank from their proprietary applications, ERPs and treasury work stations.
You’ve worked extensively with emerging payment methods like RTP, FedNow, and Push to Card. How do these compare, and which do you see gaining the most traction in the coming years?
RTP and FedNow are new payment rails and will be the backbone of the entire faster payments ecosystem in the US. These rails will support all types of use cases, whether it is b2b, b2c or c2b type of payment. They will also support both payables and receivables needs of any customer. Push to card is more of an innovative product offering of card networks to compete in the faster payments ecosystem, that allows businesses to disburse money to a person’s account using the debit card number and the card network.
Developer experience is crucial for API adoption. What principles do you follow to ensure your API products deliver exceptional developer experiences?
Making the developers’ life easy throughout their journey of integrating with your API should be your guiding principle. Clear and concise API documentation in the form of specifications, guides and tutorials is very helpful. Well defined and well executed customer support processes for onboarding, integration and production support is another must have. Having DIY experiences for developer tasks helps them move faster without the need for customer support staff to respond. Providing ready code in the form of SDKs which reduces the effort of developers is very well received by them.
We understand you’re implementing generative AI to enhance developer experiences with API products. Can you share specific examples of how AI is transforming the way developers interact with financial APIs?
Developer support is the key area where generative AI can be leveraged with high impact. Gen AI based assistants are capable of understanding the use case and requirements of the developers to recommend them the most suitable products and solutions. It is also very beneficial in providing support throughout the developer journey by sharing documentation snippets, code snippets, test cases etc. With the advent of agentic AI, the assistant can perform onboarding tasks like creating API credentials and configuring customer data at the time of onboarding.
How are you using AI to reduce operational costs for API support? What results have you seen from these initiatives?
The product operations and customer support costs can reduce significantly if AI assistants are able to provide support instantly. Customer support people can focus on more complex needs of large customers and complex integrations. It also frees up time for product operations teams to focus more on critical issues in their kanban queue, reducing the overall time to resolve issues. AI is also being used for initial level support to assist customers with problem remediation and triaging of issues to the right support and development team in the organisation.
When managing complex API products from zero to one and then scaling them to handle millions of transactions, what are your key strategies for ensuring reliability and performance?
When starting a product from scratch, I always start with a vision of where I would like my product to be in 5 years in terms of scale. Collaborating with the technology team to build the product in a way where we maintain a balance between the immediate and future long term needs of the product is very helpful. We have to build the foundational versions in a way that you can build on top of it when the time comes. Having the right tools to track and monitor performance metrics like the API throughput and latency is very helpful to proactively scale and improve your product.
Looking ahead, what technological developments do you believe will have the biggest impact on API-based payment solutions in the next 3-5 years?
There will be consolidation and strengthening of API standards and security protocols in the payments industry. We will continue to see progress on enhanced developer experience for API products. Automation of developer support tasks will see significant improvements. I also foresee adoption of SDKs and micro apps built on top of the APIs in the banking industry. Low code/ no code solutions built on top of APIs will help in faster integration to embedded payments products.
For those looking to build careers in API product management, particularly in financial services, what skills or knowledge areas would you recommend they focus on developing?
API product management revolves around developer experience. I would recommend budding API product managers to understand the life of a developer at a high level at least. Know the journey of how a developer uses API products and what tasks are they trying to accomplish. Being able to design open APIs and testing APIs from tools like Postman is an important skill for API PMs. And then there is also the skillset that any PM role demands – prioritisation, tradeoffs, stake holder management etc.
As payment systems become increasingly digital and interconnected, what emerging security challenges should the industry be preparing to address?
Robust authentication and authorisation of API calls is a must have feature for financial grade APIs. The financial institutions should have appropriate controls in place to identify the source systems the calls originate from. OAuth and MTLS security mechanisms are important for ensuring that there is multi factor authentication and the API call is coming from a trusted source.
Financial institutions also have to ensure that if an API call is coming from a third party, then they have adequate controls in place to manage TPRM risks. It’s also important to ensure that the consumers’ data security and data privacy are safeguarded in compliance with the regulatory requirements of the geography in which the consumer is residing and/ or the geography where the service provider is doing business.
