Trading industry has evolved from “I need to call the dealer to trade” to “I can trade by simple click on my mobile”. After the literacy rate and computer literacy wave, India is facing a financial literacy wave for the last 3-4 years. Automation has brought simplified modes for trading in the digital era. The boost in the industry can be seen from the fact that the number of demat accounts opened from April 2020 to January 2021 were 10.7 million, whereas the figure was 4.7 million for the entire financial year 2020. This has been made possible only due to digital transformation of the trading ecosystem.

The industry is picking up the next wave of the transformation which will extend the ecosystem into a fintech universe. Each stakeholder in the ecosystem is contributing in building this universe by placing a pillar in the infrastructure. Broking firms are helping in the growth of the ecosystem by extending their infrastructure through Open APIs. Now, what are the Open APIs? And how are these Open APIs helping the world grow?

What are Open APIs?

Before starting the discussion on Open APIs, let’s first understand what an API is. API, Application Programming Interface, helps a user to communicate between two applications. Let’s understand this with an example.

Whenever a user logs in to the IIFL Markets App, he lands on Watchlist which contains a list of stocks along with their market price. Now, where are these market prices coming from? The Markets App is communicating with the exchange through an API to fetch the live market prices.

Open APIs can be understood in simpler terms as public APIs. Various platforms develop APIs for using it on their platforms to communicate with their own server. Its use is restricted to their development team. But Open APIs are publicly accessible to every user out there. Users can communicate directly with the servers of Open API providers through any platform.

Does IIFL Securities provide Open APIs?

To promote innovation in the fintech world, IIFL Securities has extended its APIs to all its customers, partners and FinTechs to empower them with trading functionalities. This is a steppingstone for IIFL Securities to remove the roadblocks and encouraging innovation in the fintech world. The idea is to help in the growth of any idea by providing backend trading infrastructure at no cost. The core functionalities which IIFL Securities provide through Open API are:

• Live and historical market data

• Order placement, modification and cancellation functionalities

• Support for normal, stop loss, at-market, after-market, IOC, bracket and cover orders

• Position and holding details for a user

• User profiling and margin details

• Trade details for reconciliation

All the above features with simple and secure login mechanisms. Your idea can be related to developing charts, technical analysis, back testing and executing strategies, advisory solutions, financial planning, user trading behavior analysis, etc. The main roadblock is to get the above-mentioned functionalities for any user which can be removed by using the Open APIs of IIFL Securities.

The flexibility of the APIs helps in fitting them into any idea with minimum efforts. To ease the use of such APIs, IIFL Securities also offer sample codes in 9 different languages including python, Java, C#, NodeJS, Go Lang, Rust, PHP, .NET and JSON collection. The flexibility of the framework allows the users to develop the solutions in a completely customized fashion.

Stay tuned every Friday to know more about the various use cases of Open APIs and how it can help you transform the fintech world.