Co-op Bank APIs Promoting Partnerships and Innovation Among Corporates, Saccos and SMEs

Co-operative Bank has opened its APIs to help promote partnerships and innovation and build disruptive business models and platforms that deliver a seamless customer experience.

The Bank has said that it believes in co-creation and innovation that enables people, businesses and the society to grow. It also believes that innovative products and services that benefit their customers and the public in general are key to success.

Before launching an innovation, Co-op Bank says that it weighs the business needs and the prevailing market situation versus the opportunity to ensure that it meets the customer need and keeps up with the changing market trends.

With the Co-op APIs dubbed Co-opConnect, the Bank aims to publish as many banking services as possible enabling their Corporate and Sacco customers to add value to their mobile apps and web services.

The system’s APIs fall in two categories; the account information services APIs and the transactional APIs.

The Transactional APIs enable crucial functionalities: Internal Funds Transfer from a co-op bank account to another Co-opbank account; enables customers to use Pesalink while sending money from a Co-op bank account to another bank account in a different bank; instant Notification Service to send real-time notifications to a customer’s accounting system of any activities in the respective customer’s account i.e debits and credits and it also enables customers to send money from a Co-opbank account to an Mpesa wallet.

The Account Information Services APIs enables the following functionalities:

Account Information Service APIs

• Account Balance Inquiry- Shows the account balance as at a given time. The balances will be as follows;

• Cleared Balance
• Booked Balance
• Blocked Balance
• Available Balance
• Arrears Amount
• Uncleared Balance
• Overdraft  limit
• Account Transaction Inquiry- Shows the status of a specific transaction. For example was a cash deposit successful.
• Account Mini Statement- Shows the latest 10 transactions in your account.
• Exchange Rate Enquiry- Show the days foreign exchange for all major world currencies e.g. USD, GBP, EUR, CAD etc that are offered by Co-opBank
• Account Validation-   Confirms that a provided account (mostly from a third party) is a valid account number within the bank’s system.
• Status Enquiry-  This shows the status of a specific request for example if you send a pesalink transaction on Open Banking the status enquiry API will provide an update whether the transaction has reached Co-opbank and is been processed.

The organizations and FinTechs that have interacted and published the Co-op APIs stated that the APIs are simple and easy to use, accessible from web or mobile application and have a safe and secure mode of transacting.

They also have a simple integration process for easier and faster way of partnering with Fintechs and give Real time update of payment status delivering a seamless customer experience.

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