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Comment by legohorizons | Hacker News Reader

In a world where consumer spend is going to be shrinking amidst an upcoming downturn and consumer CAC going through the rough "vertical enterprise software" is going to be the next megatrend.

Sabre does 3.87B in revenue and Duffel is just re-inventing Sabre with a better suite of APIs. What other legacy enterprise, vertical software solutions exist that people could "Duffel?"

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> Sabre does 3.87B in revenue and Duffel is just re-inventing Sabre with a better suite of APIs. What other legacy enterprise, vertical software solutions exist that people could "Duffel?"

I could enumerate 100's of these problems, but this really isn't the right question to ask. The only reason this startup is possible is because the IATA allowed them to be. So perhaps the question should be "how many industries are ready to standardize their communication protocols via modern APIs?"

Great example - providing a unified banking API is clearly a multi-billion dollar a year business. But it requires the network effect of all of the banks to be involved. This either happens via industry groups or via regulation.

> banking API is clearly a multi-billion dollar a year business

Why?

AFAIK most big banks have APIs, and it would seem to me the use cases for needing to access an account programmatically are few.

On the consumer banking side I would agree with you, not many individuals have complex enough banking needs where programmatic access would be a value-add. However if you look at businesses, any company doing more than (let's say) 50 bank-to-bank payments a month I think would benefit from being able to automate their bank account interactions in some fashion.

Disclosure: I work on banking APIs

And I would humbly ask for someone to think again about the regular people on a more pragmatic or tech-savvy end. My banking is relatively simple, and yet many of my needs are not covered by any existing solutions. The absolute basics I want is an API access to my current per-account balance. Another step would be programmatic access to per-account transaction history.

I don't want to use banking apps and sites daily, they all offer garbage UX that's designed for upselling credit cards, consumer loans and other financial product. What I want is simple API access. I can take it from there, and do a better job than banks do, because my own incentives align better with my own interest.

1. Most big banks require a ton of red tape to use those APIs. Even if you're using modern technology with a top tier dev team, this is still a 4-6 week endeavor at its absolute quickest turnaround.

2. All ACH transfers, for example, have to clear the Fed, which is done via FTP.

3. The consumer use cases are endless (make payments, analytics, etc). Just look at Mint, Truebill, etc.

4. The commercial user cases are endless (treasury management, AP, AR, etc).

(Disclosure: I'm the CEO of Duffel) Totally agree with your point above re: IATA. They made it possible but for a different reason, they opened the door to competition.

Standardisation of communication protocol can only do so much, especially when the standard is built to accommodate the needs of 100s of airlines using 100s of different host systems.

Also, there is ton of red tape around airlines' APIs as well, I'd say probably as much as in banking.

FTP? I hope at least FTPS.

I mean I feel like "need" is a bad choice, when the point is that it can be a lot better. I didn't need Venmo to send money to friends, but it is quite clearly better than pre-existing options. Also there are plenty of shitty banks out there with their own insular network and plenty of money they are working with. What options do you have in the Middle East per say?

This is the essential issue with the travel industry. The data, and especially integration with the GDS's themselves is tightly controlled.

I've had many an idea for travel startups but data has been a non-starter.

I give Duffel props for having the mojo/influence/connections/funding to successfully implement something like this in an industry that has had few players. The only one I can think of is ITA but they are no longer independent.

From what I understand, Duffel are connecting to NDC APIs exposed by the airlines (or rather, by the Airlines' IT provider, i.e. Sabre and Amadeus... but that's another story). And on top of that, they expose a nice REST API (that is very similar in philosophy and structure to the NDC XML - Offer, Order). This is a win for the airlines, because every booking through Duffel is a booking without paying the GDS tax

I was wondering why it was only a handful of airlines! Thanks for the insight.

You could probably say the same about Stripe when they just launched. Authorize.net was doing billions in revenue and stripe just re-invented them with a better suite of APIs.

Yeah Stripe was the pioneer in this space.

Truepill is an API for pharmacies that is doing seriously well and is under-hyped. The API-ification of things is a serious boon for developers everywhere.

But financial services (payments) and travel are just two verticals. There are vertical software solutions in healthcare, other aspects of FinTech (lending/wealth management), retail that can probably be re-vamped.

The question is what other legacy providers other than Authorize.net/Sabre exist. Where do we find software solutions like this?

Stripe is only loosely synonymous with Authorize.net

Your missing the part where Stripe also bundled the payment processing (Stripe uses Vantiv AFAIK) and the merchant account (which you need to get from a Bank). Stripe's innovation was to simply flatten the stack across gateway, processor and merchant bank account.

Stripe has an incredible API, but it's only one half of the equation here.

The $1.4B Sabre does in airline bookings revenue isn't insignificant but don't underestimate the difficulty of reinventing Sabre with a better suite of APIs from both a technical and commercial standpoint though.

I think access to bank APIs is a similar space. Companies like Tink or Truelayer used to rely on credential passing but now with the wake of open bank apis (PTSD2) they are implementing standard oauth flows. That being said, I think that the biggest entry-level problem in that space is an enormous level of regulations regarding bank data. You can't even start using their API without your app being validated by them.

>(PTSD2) Thanks, I'll steal that.

Isn't this the space that Plaid is taking the lead in? What other opportunities are there in the banking API system aside from what Plaid is doing/won't do in the near future?

Plaid used to publish https://blog.plaid.com/rfs/ but they stopped this year.

What do you mean by "vertical enterprise software"?

Concur

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