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How Pay Nearby Streamlined and Secured Its Financial Services with an API-First Approach

An ultra-local Indian fintech startup, Pay Nearby, focused on providing digital financial services to underserved urban and rural areas. The company’s offerings included micro-lending, bill payments, peer-to-peer transfers, and financial literacy tools through a mobile app. With a mission to empower small businesses, rural entrepreneurs, and individuals with limited access to traditional banking services, Pay Nearby aimed to use technology to bridge the financial inclusion gap. They had a great vision in adopting the API economy.

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Tech used

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API Management

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Digital Identity

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Cloud

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Automation

India

Challenge 

Pay Nearby initially relied on in-house developed APIs and third-party services. The lack of a centralized API management solution made it difficult to scale operations and integrate new partners efficiently. As Pay Nearby grew, its API ecosystem expanded rapidly, increasing the burden of maintaining security, versioning, and documentation for a growing number of endpoints.


They started with AWS API gateway. However, working with complex lambda functions wasn't very comfortable for them. The lambda functions, especially those handling large payloads or requiring multiple external API calls or database operations, result in timeouts. More importantly, while an API gateway offers flexibility, it means that organizations have to build & fix their API management solution - thus investing precious dev hours in core (but extremely critical) tech.


Pay Nearby needed to ensure that all financial transactions were secure and compliant with regulations from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and other local governing bodies. Managing security across multiple APIs, particularly with sensitive user data like bank account details, was complex without a unified security solution. Data privacy regulations and compliance were major concerns. Pay Nearby’s business model relied heavily on partnerships with local banks, payment gateways, and other third-party services for enabling digital payments and lending. Integrating with these partners was often cumbersome and slow, as the fintech had to individually manage each integration, often leading to inconsistencies in data flow, transaction processing and error handling.

Solution 

Looking at our credible journey in the domain, Pay Nearby involved us (Cateina) for the solution. Cateina did an extensive analysis of their specific requirements. We learned from their previous challenges and roadblocks. After careful evaluation, we recommended Tyk API Gateway, the best-suiting API management solution to Pay Nearby. The main selection points were its enhanced security, easy management, and improved scalability. Its enterprise capabilities made it an ideal solution for Pay Nearby. We implemented the following Tyk features for Pay Nearby: API Gateway for Centralized Management, Security and Authentication, Scalability with Load Balancing, Third-Party API Integration and Monitoring, Policy Enforcement and Compliance, Reduced Infrastructure Costs, Developer Enablement.


Cateina followed the best practices while setting up Tyk to utilise its full capabilities of providing a unified platform to manage all internal and external APIs, reducing fragmentation and simplifying integration. The Pay Nearby could now centralize API routing, monitor traffic, and manage authentication for different services in one place. The API Gateway allowed for the efficient management of the services, reducing the complexity of the system architecture. Cateina enabled API-level security with built-in features such as OAuth 2.0, JWT Authentication, Rate Limiting etc. Cateina implemented available key-based access control for its services, ensuring secure user authentication and preventing unauthorized access to sensitive financial data. We also enabled end-to-end encryption (TLS/SSL) for all transactions, ensuring that sensitive data remained secure during communication between clients, the fintech’s platform, and third-party services.


Cateina leveraged Tyk’s ability to create custom API definitions and handle external API integrations allowing Pay Nearby to seamlessly onboard new partners. Whether integrating with local banks, mobile wallets, or payment gateways, Cateina worked out the simplified process and ensured consistency across all integrations. Pay Nearby could also monitor third-party API performance through Tyk’s analytics, identifying bottlenecks or failures before they impacted customers. Cateina helped Pay Nearby enforce usage policies and data privacy protocols through Tyk, ensuring that API calls adhered to security standards and compliance regulations. The centralized logging and monitoring features made it easy to track API usage and generate audit reports for compliance purposes.


The Developer Portal offered by Tyk is customizable. Cateina exposed Pay Nearby’s external APIs through this portal. The portal makes it easy for internal and external developers to access API documentation, test APIs, and quickly integrate fintech services into their applications.

Result

The implementation of Tyk API Gateway by Cateina led to several key improvements for Pay Nearby. They were able to manage over 20 APIs initially reducing the complexity of API management and improving the developer experience. The unified interface for handling all API traffic helped reduce integration time with third-party services from several weeks to a few days. API versioning and documentation were streamlined, allowing for easier maintenance and updates of APIs as the platform evolved. Cateina helped Pay Nearby enhance security and compliance with Tyk’s built-in security features, Pay Nearby saw a reduction in security incidents. 


The key-based authentication, rate limiting, and encryption ensured secure transactions for customers. Cateina helped enable scalability and performance improvements. The API response times were reduced and Pay Nearby experienced a significant improvement in system stability during peak transaction periods (e.g., festive seasons or sudden surge in demands). The ability to scale horizontally using Tyk’s auto-scaling features meant that Pay Nearby could handle spikes in traffic without downtime or degradation of service. 


Cateina mastered Tyk and showed Faster Third-Party Integrations. Integrating with new third-party services was 3x faster, allowing Pay Nearby to onboard new banks, payment gateways, and fintech partners in a matter of days. This enabled Pay Nearby to expand its services rapidly and offer new features to customers more quickly. Cateina helped implement industry-standard API life cycle management for better customer experience and satisfaction. Fintech saw an improvement in customer satisfaction due to faster transaction processing, and the ability to integrate new services such as instant lending. Transaction failures during peak times decreased significantly and users were able to complete financial transactions with minimal latency.

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70%

Reduced API integration time

30-40%

Improved API response time

3x

Faster third-party integration

20+

APIs successfully managed

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