What is a Unified API? – Introducing the Future of B2B Integrations

Whether a startup or an enterprise, companies of every size are using an ever-expanding network of third-party software vendors and expect these applications to be connected to each other. As a SaaS provider, you know that B2B API integrations allow you to offer a product that integrates with other applications your business customers use.

However, building, maintaining, and scaling these integrations is both challenging and time-consuming. Non-uniform data fields, sudden API changes, API authentication and increasing demand for new integrations can pose significant problems. Despite the considerable investment of time and developer resources, API integrations often falter in function, scalability, and accuracy. This is particularly pronounced for fragmented categories like Banking, Accounting, CRM, HRMS, and E-commerce, where the costs associated with development and maintenance can quickly spiral out of control.

Unified APIs (also known as universal APIs) were created to address the issue of building scalable B2B integrations.

This blog post will cover what makes a Unified API unique, the key capabilities and features of a Unified API, examples of unified APIs, their benefits, and the potential hurdles when using a Unified API.

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The Problem with B2B Integrations Today

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Before delving into the details of Unified APIs, it's essential to understand the problem with API integrations today. An Application Programming Interface, or API is a set of code-based definitions and protocols that allow multiple software applications to communicate with each other over the internet. In other words, an API is a set of rules that allows different software applications to communicate and interact with each other.

Today, many software applications also provide APIs that allow developers to offer connected solutions. However, the process of building, maintaining, and scaling these API integrations is fraught with challenges.

Building API integrations involves:

• Researching documentation
• Handling custom objects and fields
• Figuring out security schemes
• Managing different authentication methods
• Testing the API

Once integrated, maintaining connections introduces additional hurdles, such as adapting to new API versions, updating outdated documentation, and dealing with opaque rate limits. This process is challenging, time-consuming, and takes away from you building your core product.

Aggregating multiple APIs from different providers amplifies these problems. The lack of standardisation makes it difficult for middleware applications to establish reliable connections with various providers, requiring them to repeat the integration process for each unique connection.

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What is a Unified API?

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A Unified API (Or universal API) is a single API that aggregates APIs in the same software category (like accounting, HRMS, CRM, and e-commerce). A Unified API makes integration with various platforms easier as it offers a standard endpoint, handles authentication, and normalises API calls and data models.

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Key Capabilities/Features of a Unified API

A unified API presents a standardised set of endpoints for accessing data and functionality across multiple systems. To achieve this consistency, a few key elements are essential:

Single Access Point

A Unified API offers a single access point for all integrations and just one style of API, whether REST, SOAP, or GraphQL, regardless of the styles each individual API uses

Data Standardisation

A key feature a Unified API offers is data standardisation. Data standardisation or normalization is crucial in ensuring that data from different sources is organised and represented uniformly.

Common Authentication

Just as each API may come in different architectural styles, and may format data differently, each can manage authentication uniquely. A Unified API handles authentication for all underlying APIs, so developers don't have to create and manage multiple unique auth connections.

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Examples and Use Cases of Unified APIs

Unified APIs are becoming a popular way to integrate specific software categories. Examples of Unified API categories include e-commerce, CRM, Banking, Accounting, HRMS, and Payroll. Companies like RootFi, Rutter, API2Cart, Apideck, Merge, Vessel, Plaid, Tink, Teller, Codat, Finch, and many others offer unified APIs for different software categories.

Companies use RootFi’s Unified Accounting API to automate accounting, surface business insights and underwrite credit.

Accounting Automation

A variety of software providers, including spend management, AP/AR, procurement, inventory management, and HR and payroll use RootFi’s Unified Accounting API to automate the accounting and reconciliation process in their business customers’ accounting platform of choice.

Business Insights

Software providers also use RootFi’s Unified API to generate business insights. Using a Unified API, they are able to read accounting data to offer solutions for Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A), Investor Reporting, and more.

Credit Underwriting

‍Financial institutions and fintechs use accounting data, in addition to existing banking data, to evaluate a company and underwrite credit. By using a Unified API, they are able to seamlessly retrieve a company's accounting information and offer credit in the form of term loans, working capital, bill factoring and more.

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When to Use a Unified API

Related: Build vs. Buy: The Ultimate Guide to B2B Integrations

Using a Unified API is one of many options in your integration strategy. Depending on the complexity and scalability of your problem and whether your integrations need to offer internal connectivity or be customer-facing, you could consider using an embedded iPaaS or an API marketplace. However, neither solution offers the combination of data normalization and scalability that a Unified API provides.

Unified APIs help simplify and streamline the process of building and maintaining multiple integrations in the same category. Based on customer and market demand, you may need to offer multiple integrations but may not have the time, money or internal engineering bandwidth.

When your business customers want your product to connect to the applications they use

If your business customers want to connect the applications they use to your solution, or your competitors are already offering integrations and you need to catch up, using a Unified API is the optimal solution. A Unified API like RootFi allows you to bypass roadblocks and offer integrations in a few days, not a few months.

When you want your product to connect to multiple applications in the same category

If you need your product to connect to multiple applications in the same category, a Unified API allows your developers to learn and interact with only one API and its endpoints. This helps them avoid the complications of learning and connecting the front-end of your product to multiple API endpoints, for each of the platforms you want your product to connect to. As your customer base expands, using a Unified API allows you to instantly offer more integrations, regardless of the platform

When you don’t have the resources to build API integrations in-house

Depending on the complexity of the API, building a single integration can take as a few weeks or a few months to build. Since API integrations require significant developer resources, depending on the time, price and developer constraints building multiple integrations may not be realistic.

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Potential Hurdles with Unified APIs

Depending on the API aggregator, Unified APIs can also come with their share of possible downsides. These include:

1. Potential latency issues: Introducing an extra layer in your product can cause latency or time delays. This is because the API integration may need to pull or push large amounts of data to the underlying platforms.
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2. Increased data privacy concerns: Sharing confidential data with a third party increases the data privacy and security concerns of your solution. Ensuring your customers’ data security depends on the security features built-in.
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3. Reliability of the API aggregator: Depending on how crudely the API aggregator is built, breaks in connectivity with the Unified API can result in data being inaccessible. This could be a result of underlying API changes or bugs in the Unified API.
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4. Limited flexibility: Since Unified APIs normalize data and API calls using a lowest common denominator approach, some underlying platforms may have fields that are unique to their system. As a result, some raw or custom data and specific API  calls, though important, may not be normalized. The ease of accessing raw data or custom data fields becomes critical when choosing an API aggregator.
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5. Code-heavy solution: Since API aggregators are a code-heavy solution, configuring your front-end with a Unified API may be challenging. Considering the depth of onboarding and customer success support becomes very important.

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At RootFi, we address all of these concerns. Learn how RootFi addresses every drawback Unified APIs can pose.

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Benefits of Unified APIs

Using a Unified API comes with many benefits to both the developers and the company overall. These include:

1. Consolidated Documentation: Developers need only learn one set of documentation, rather than juggle multiple sets of documentation for each underlying platform.
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2. Normalized data, authentication and more: A Unified API allows you to read and write data in a single format and offers standardised authentication while giving you the flexibility to handle edge cases and custom requests.
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3. Offloaded Maintenance: Maintenance of all underlying API integrations, including breaks and errors due to bugs, rate limits and API changes can be offloaded to the API aggregator.
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4. Significant Cost-Savings: Integrations can be extremely expensive to build. Depending on the complexity of the APIs, you may need to bear the expense of dedicated engineering teams or hire additional engineers to build out API integrations in-house.
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5. Faster Time-to-Market: A Unified API lets you avoid spending months mapping schemas, managing authentication and building complex integrations one at a time. With a Unified API, you can accelerate your product roadmap from months to days.
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6. Refocus developer resources on the core product: By using a Unified API, you can refocus engineering bandwidth that would have spent months developing domain expertise needed to build and test multiple integrations.
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7. Effortless Scalability: Regardless of the category, the software options for customers are often endless. As your product’s popularity and customer base grow, using a Unified API allows you to scale effortlessly, as you can enable any integrations pre-built by the Unified API at the click of a button.
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8. Enterprise-level security: Using a trusted Unified API allows you to leverage all the benefits of APIs without the tedious process of encrypting data and building enterprise-grade security protocols.
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These benefits enable a straightforward integration strategy and save time, energy and developer resources that would have been spent on building in-house integrations.

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Leverage Financial Data with RootFi's Unified API

Outsourcing your integrations to a Unified API provider like RootFi removes the hassle of building and maintaining complex integrations, freeing up your company's resources to focus on your core product. Unified APIs are an effective way to streamline B2B integrations and make the process of building, maintaining, and scaling these integrations extremely manageable.

With a Unified API like RootFi, you can achieve greater efficiency, reduce costs, and stay ahead of the competition. Turn API integrations from a bottleneck in your roadmap to your competitive advantage.

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If you're interested in exploring how RootFi’s Unified API can be your data integration solution, you can start for free with 5 active connections. Alternatively, you can book a demo or email us at contactus@rootfi.in.

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