How can we empower people and organizations to send and receive money more conveniently? How can we help Canadians participate safely in the digital economy? How can we enable solutions big enough for a big country, but accessible enough for every individual?
If you work in digital innovation, these are questions you might have as you look to the future. At Interac, our job is to help you find innovative ways to answer them, whether through our data and insights, the ways we help solve challenges through collaboration, our human-centric approach to design thinking, or the Interac Developer Portal.
The Interac Developer Portal, which lives on our Innovation Hub, was built (and recently relaunched) to support developers who work on products for the Canadian market. It’s part of the work we do to fuel innovation — in payments and beyond — that help Canadians connect and exchange value.
The new Interac Developer Portal: A more seamless way to connect with our tools
By making the Interac Developer Portal more seamless and responsive, Interac is trying to help developers bring their projects to fruition faster.
“We’re in the knowledge economy too, and we understand we have to create a great user experience for anyone who needs to access our assets,” said Karen Deng, Director, Innovation and Ecosystem Engagement at Interac. “When relaunching the Innovation Hub and Interac Developer Portal, we’ve focused on making it high-quality, scalable, easy to deploy and easy to consume. We want to do right by our industry and ecosystem partners. We want to give them better experiences.”
Documentation, for example, is easy to follow, so software teams can get up to speed on how a resource works and move forward without getting stuck.
“We want to simplify the understanding of what the product does,” Victor Lavrentyev, Senior Product Manager at Interac, said. “That’s one of the ways way we assist you.”
Responding to developers’ input is another important function of the Interac Developer Portal, helping to reduce friction and enable teams to work faster.
“We revamped and refreshed the Interac Developer Portal to provide a streamlined experience for people in Canada’s tech sector,” said Victor Lavrentyev, Senior Product Manager at Interac. “We want financial institutions, fintechs and other organizations to have a fast and secure way to connect to the suite of our products.”
The Innovation Hub and Interac Developer Portal will also make it easier for developers in participating organizations to connect to the Interac suite of products and services — tools that enable Canadians to live increasingly digital lives.
Payments is a domain full of “hidden complexities,” Victor said, and Interac is eager to help developers navigate it.
“We want to remove barriers for developers who aren’t necessarily experts in payments so they can focus on their applications and value they create for Canadians,” he said.
As part of that, Victor said the Innovation Hub and Interac Developer Portal are resources to help developers through the process of integrating with Interac platform.
Interac: Your partner in innovation
In the big picture, Karen said, Interac uses its position at the centre of data exchange ecosystems to facilitate innovation and a more seamless life for Canadians.
“Ultimately our goal is to help fuel innovation to give Canadians more choice and security in an increasingly digital world,” she said.
By allowing other entities to incorporate Interac products and services, more Canadians will be able to transact quickly, seamlessly and in a cost-effective way. And the team’s biggest hope is that developers will think of fresh new ways to make Interac products and services part of their offerings.
“With our new Innovation Hub and Interac Developer Portal, we hope to serve as a catalyst for innovation for fintechs in Canada, inspiring ideas about what’s possible in payments, verification and beyond,” Karen said.
