First Abu Dhabi Bank Cuts API Operational Costs by 57% With Kong

United Arab Emirates (UAE) Bank Modernizes Infrastructure With Service Connectivity Platform and Accelerates Time to Market for Mobile Banking Application

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE/AETOSWire)-- Kong Inc., creators of the leading service connectivity platform, today announced that First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), the UAE’s largest bank and one of the world’s largest and safest financial institutions, has deployed Kong’s service connectivity platform to modernize its microservices-driven banking platform. As the banking industry transforms at a rapid pace, Kong provides reliable, secure and observable connectivity for FAB’s APIs and services within a scalable infrastructure. Moving toward decentralization through Kong has enabled FAB to accelerate development and business agility to push the customer experience further.

Executing on a company-wide cloud and digital transformation initiative, FAB chose to migrate away from a monolithic architecture to embrace an API-first model and build a unified platform. The company leverages Kong’s platform to provide customers with innovative and secure new products and services by utilizing Kong’s OAuth 2.0 and Mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) features, Developer Portal and open banking plugin. With Kong, FAB is able to more effectively onboard new APIs, cutting operational costs by 57% and eliminating the heavy lifting of continuously developing custom plugins. As part of the platform, FAB uses the Kong Ingress Controller to leverage Kubernetes functionality and as a single entry point for simple API gateway management. The company also utilizes the platform’s Developer Portal to efficiently create a public-facing portal that provides the outside developer community access to its APIs. FAB leverages these features alongside the open banking plugin to remain poised for future innovation as local industry trends and regulations drive transformation.

“As we made the move toward microservices, we required a lightweight solution that could seamlessly align with our multi-cloud and on-premises environments,” said Jayakumar Ganesan, Head of Service - Digital Platforms at FAB. “With Kong’s platform, we were able to deliver one of our commercial mobile banking applications to our customers in just about three months instead of seven. We also now save four to eight weeks per plugin – totaling up to four months of recaptured development time – by utilizing Kong’s turnkey features in lieu of writing custom plugins.”

Built on Kong’s core open source technology, Kong’s service connectivity platform enables organizations to secure, connect and orchestrate their APIs and services. Designed for the modern era of software development including microservices, service mesh, serverless and other emerging architectures, Kong acts as the nervous system of the cloud – intelligently connecting all of a company’s APIs and microservices across cloud-native, hybrid and on-prem environments to make it easy for developer teams to create scalable, microservice-driven applications that drive business growth.

“For most API gateways on the market, you typically need to undergo some level of customization effort to have it properly fit into your existing ecosystem. One of the best aspects about Kong is that it has out-of-the-box plugins that already meet the majority of our industry requirements, which allows us to focus on building out new functionality rather than utilizing mind share to maintain the API gateway infrastructure,” said Jayakumar. “In terms of manageability, scalability and agility, what Kong provides us is best in class.”

“FAB’s decision to migrate from monolithic to microservices architecture was crucial in paving the path toward continuous delivery of new digital experiences,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “As the banking industry continues to evolve, FAB is positioned to keep pace at the speed of the cloud and stay ahead of revolutionary trends, such as open banking.”