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Xinja Deploys Kong Enterprise to Power Mobile Banking Platform

Banking CIO Outlook | Friday, August 07, 2020

Greg Steel, CIO

Kong makes it possible for Xinja to quickly deploy innovative new products and services available from any device, real-time, and provide the responsiveness customers are demanding today.

FREMONT, CA: Kong, the leading cloud connectivity company, announced that Xinja Bank, Australia's fully digital neobank, has deployed Kong Enterprise to power its modern, microservices-driven mobile banking platform. With Kong's service connectivity platform, Xinja can now more effectively connect, secure, and manage all of its APIs and services, while ensuring architectural flexibility and scalability as the company continues to innovate and grow.

As a 100-percent digital bank designed for mobile, Xinja brings a new kind of bank to customers and revolutionizes the entire banking experience. This includes not just providing traditional banking products but also integrating with other valuable products through open APIs to deliver a financial ecosystem to its customers.

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The launch of Xinja's lending platform, currently being developed, will see the first introduction of Kong into Xinja's infrastructure. "Our lending origination partner needed us to expose our APIs in a way that was secure and compliant with OIDC standards," said Rohan Sharp, co-founder and head of architecture at Xinja Bank. "This was easy with Kong; not only could we comply with industry standards, but we could protect our APIs and internal landscape quickly and with low risk – while minimizing impacts on Xinja's existing infrastructure."

Kong Enterprise, combined with Kong's extensive plugins hub, enables Xinja to open up its APIs in an efficient, rapid, and scalable way that exposes the services and allows the team to structure and secure the APIs. The platform's Developer Portal provides the company with an easy and flexible way to present a public-facing portal to the outside developer community who access its APIs. This will be crucial to Xinja's business as the industry moves towards open banking, and more third-party developers start to engage with the application.

Beyond using Kong to more efficiently collaborate with third-party developers, manage all external-facing API traffic and help handle continued traffic growth, Xinja also leverages Kuma's universal service mesh with the Kong platform. The Kuma integration allows the team to easily implement a service mesh to apply consistent policies and access controls across its internal microservice landscape, which works seamlessly with external and internal-facing API gateways.

"Because Xinja's technology is built on microservices using containerized and serverless deployments, Kong's cloud native and Kubernetes-native platform aligns much better than its competitors with our technology architecture," said Sharp. "It sits well in our technology stack as a containerized service deployable in our environment, making it easy to manage and deploy, just like any of our other services on Xinja's platform. Most importantly, Kong enables us to innovate at the highest level and bring modern banking to Australia."

Built on Kong's core open source technology, Kong Enterprise is an end-to-end service connectivity platform that enables organizations to effectively secure, connect, and orchestrate their APIs and services. Designed for the modern era of software development including microservices, service mesh, serverless, and other emerging architectures, Kong's platform acts as the nervous system of the cloud – intelligently connecting all of a company's APIs and microservices natively within and across clouds, Kubernetes, data centers and more. This helps developer teams create scalable, micro service-driven applications that drive business growth.

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