Four organizations using API-led strategies to digitally transform: financial services, insurance and healthcare and retail industries

At MuleSoft CONNECT AMER, organizations across industries shared how they are leveraging API strategies to increase agility and scale to meet growing or new demands, while accelerating digital transformation. RBC Wealth Management, QBE Insurance, UCSF and WatchBox shared how they are exposing and consuming business capabilities with APIs in order to deliver connected experiences and scale quickly.

RBC Wealth Management: Financial services digitize and connect mission-critical processes with Anypoint Platform

In financial services, delivering an integrated and connected customer onboarding experience is paramount. That is exactly what RBC Wealth Management set out to do, as one of the largest wealth management firms in the U.S. providing financial services solutions and advising for its clients. With COVID-19, a digital onboarding process was a necessity as new clients did not want to come into a physical branch or be required to touch a mail-in application.

In order to enable digital-first onboarding, RBC Wealth Management had to first connect disparate systems together, from modern cloud applications like Salesforce and Docubase, to legacy backend systems. With MuleSoft, RBC Wealth Management connected its legacy service, which provides real time balances at a financial account level, to client and household level information from Salesforce.

Advisors could then access financial holdings and real time balances for an entire household with a click of the button and provide that insight to clients that call in. By first connecting digital channels, RBC Wealth Management is then able to drive reuse and reduce the friction in customer onboarding.

“It”s been a business saver for us,” said Greg Beltzer, VP, Technology at RBC Wealth Management. “We made it easy for the advisor, who is now working from home many times, and then super easy for the client, not having to deal with any of that paperwork at all … that they would have had to in the past.”

The need for seamless digital experiences is only continuing to grow, underscoring the importance of an API-led strategy that emphasizes reuse in order to deliver business value at speed.

QBE Insurance: An in-depth look at an API transformation journey in insurance

From helping modernize legacy platforms, to enabling new business services, APIs can help organizations drive faster business growth. Shrenik Dagli, Vice President at QBE Insurance shared how Accenture helped his organization unlock data that was critical to their business growth by starting with an API-led strategy to power their digital transformation.

QBE Insurance needed to ensure that external business vendors, such as LexisNexis, could take on a new APS service from them. On the internal level, QBE needed to improve response times for integrations with external partners for direct dose business. QBE Insurance used MuleSoft’s C4E to enable a centrally managed API strategy. It used continuous monitoring for performance, and leveraged alerts. Different regions could utilize a catalog of APIs that can be adapted to their situation, enabling faster integration.

In addition to increased performance, QBE Insurance has been able to integrate “very quickly,” especially in the claim space with external partners. It has enabled 300 plus microservices within enrollment on MuleSoft.

Bringing everyone in the business together was a cornerstone for success of the program. “It”s very crucial that a CIO works very closely with the business members and the business leaders to come up with a collective strategy around it,” stated Shrenik Dagli. “At QBE it”s been phenomenal. Most of the business and the CIO were working in lockstep to get this thing delivered; that eventually paved the way for better business benefits.”

UCSF’s API-led approach to unlocking clinical data

Interoperability has remained one of the most elusive goals in healthcare on the path to drive large-scale digital transformation. Healthcare and life sciences leaders like UCSF, a leading academic medical center, are using APIs to drive innovative patient experiences.

UCSF uses an API-led approach to take the place of point-to-point integration, saving staff time and creating greater efficiencies. In the educational space, it replaced point-to-point integration in order to share student information like class schedules, grades and identifiers at UCSF and beyond, such as for cross-campus enrollment.

In its health and medical center, UCSF takes an API-led approach toward interoperability goals for its electronic medical record (EMR) system that houses patient medical records and billing info. UCSF implements Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) APIs to enable integration with EMRs in a modular and highly reusable way. For example, it implemented FHIR for NEWT, a tool that allows for pediatric doctors and parents to identify weight loss and weight gain issues in newborns. The application is lodged from Epic using SMART and FHIR. Using FHIR, it gathers a baby”s clinical information and goes to an algorithm to display the information to the clinicians.

“MuleSoft allowed us to modernize our integration capabilities, and sets us up for growth as we face the many demands and challenges of integration.” shared Victor Galvez, Manager of Integration Reporting at UCSF.

Using modern applications, powered by reusable FHIR and Epic APIs, allows clinicians at UCSF to ultimately provide better care for patients.

WatchBox: Delivering innovation online and in-stores with Anypoint Platform

For retail businesses, consumer behaviors have changed forever as the current landscape prompts consumers to stay indoors and shop through digital channels. One business navigating accelerating this digital innovation is WatchBox, the world’s leading platform for pre-owned luxury watches. By the end of 2019, WatchBox launched its digital platform on Commerce Cloud across five global locations, a flagship brick and mortar store in Dubai, and enabled an in-store mobile application as well as a blockchain-backed digital voucher application.

The core of WatchBox’s business is the management of its physical goods inventory. Previously, ultra-high value skews in the inventory had no means to get integrated into a modern e-commerce or CRM platform like it does today. Legacy processes managed inventory and posted it on websites. Now with API enabled systems, WatchBox’s inventory management system is now a key source to “MuleSoft”s powerful engine that is bringing thousands of skews live on five different global websites,” said Shri Ballal, CTO at WatchBox.

Additionally, WatchBox developed digital experience-focused apps for customers to get the same digital experience in-store as they would on e-commerce platforms. The entire layer was developed primarily using what was developed in previous stages of its digital transformation, making the most of MuleSoft API-led architecture framework.

With its digital transformation journey built on reusability, WatchBox is able to see results, including the ability to launch an e-commerce site for a new region in less than four weeks.

Composing business capabilities with APIs

Building foundations for the future starts with an API-led approach that unlocks and integrates data to compose existing digital capabilities into business-critical services. CIOs and IT teams have turned to MuleSoft to digitally transform, implement new projects and make their organizations stronger, more resilient and responsive over time.

For more on how organizations like Decathlon and HSBC are speeding up digital transformation, read insights from five industry leaders here.