Apigate is a new-breed Application Programming Interface (API) platform that connects a world class ecosystem to enable businesses to transform digitally. To know more about the company’s background and the platform it offers, Telecom Review conducted an exclusive interview with Apigate CEO Zoran Vasiljev during the Mobile World Congress 2019.
Apigate was originally born out of telco and an internal business unit of Axiata, the second largest operator in Asia-Pacific region. It was in fact built as an internal API business unit to digitize the six operators of Axiata Group.
“The last couple of years we have extracted the company as an independent API business that is now a global company serving over 110 operators worldwide and connecting over 300 revenue generating merchants into an ecosystem built on the premise of helping speed up the digitization into monetization. This is what Apigate is all about”, said Apigate CEO to introduce the company.
One of the important objectives of Apigate is to enable businesses across the globe to achieve rapid growth and monetization. How? Zoran Vaslijev explains, “Having been born out of telco, we have learned that there are speeds to digitization and to monetization. We realized that it is necessary to remove quite a bit of friction that exists in the process of digitization and then monetization. This has allowed us to understand the pain points in customers’ journeys or anybody consuming digital today.”
From mobile payment to identity management, omni-channel communications and beyond, Apigate enables connectivity and monetization with one seamless integration.
“The main focus of the Next-gen API platform is to expose and develop as many APIs as the entire ecosystem is willing to consume and it benefits either one of sides being third parties that are connecting into the system or the operators that are willing to connect and have access to the ecosystem.
“Furthermore, the platform is built on an open-source that is affordable for anybody to first adopt, experiment and build on top of it without complex contracts and expensive deals. At the same time, when we look at other elements of the monetization platform, it covers everything which is critical in today’s digital world such as acquisition API, fraud protection, seamless authentication, direct carrier billing, wallet aggregation, vouchers, micro-ending, in addition to a suite of communication APIs.”
Apigate’s platform is a telco-grade platform built to benefit the telco environment that has been disrupted over the last years significantly. Operators can truly benefit from it because of the revenue that is being generated. It is also interesting for the third parties and digital companies willing to offer their services to consumers.
Apigate CEO thinks that the company is ready to help whoever was late to realize the importance of the platform business.
“We know that 81% of the executives in the telco space said that the platform business is on their roadmap over the next 3 years. We believe it’s two years too late. Unless you have a platform strategy already, you might be too late and obsolete very quickly. You don’t have to invent and do the hard work all over again yourself, we can take care of it.”
