Industry: Fintech
Results
About SnapTrade
SnapTrade is a Canadian fintech company founded in 2017 with the goal of offering a superior API to fintechs that are connecting to retail brokerage and cryptocurrency exchange accounts. SnapTrade provides fintechs a better user experience in their apps through speed of access to investment data, reliable connections, real-time and unified investing data, and broad broker coverage.
The Problem
SnapTrade's API is purpose-built and as a result, it was more complex to implement for customers that had inexperienced developers or were using an outsourced dev shop to do the integration. To onboard some of their early customers, SnapTrade had to manually show and tell each customer how to implement the feature their customer wanted (i.e. how to use SnapTrade to process a stock trade) and how to write the code to correctly authenticate and call the API. This took months of effort. Furthermore, if the customer was using a programming language SnapTrade was unfamiliar with, it was very difficult for SnapTrade to support that customer during onboarding. This resulted in lost sales as customers dropped out of the funnel and higher costs as SnapTrade was burning engineering hours onboarding customers.
The Solution
SnapTrade turned to Konfig's SDKs to solve these challenges. Konfig auto-generates and distributes SDKs in 6 languages that SnapTrade's customers import into their IDE, which helps guide them through integrating with SnapTrade's API. Best of all, by using Konfig's end-to-end automated process, no work is required on SnapTrade's part - every time SnapTrade updates their OpenAPI spec as part of their normal workflow, Konfig is notified and generates, tests, and publishes a new set of SDKs for their customers to use.
"Before [Konfig], we always had to have back and forth with signature and timestamp handling in order to onboard properly. Now, this is all handled in the SDK's so all we have to do is have an introductory call to explain how the api works then get them a set of keys!"
Alex Sutherland, SnapTrade Developer
Results and Benefits
By using Konfig's SDK generation tool, SnapTrade can offer a fast and seamless onboarding experience for customers onto their API, no matter what language they are using. In turn, customers were able to more quickly see the value of SnapTrade's API and become delighted customers using SnapTrade in production. The SDKs also provided value to SnapTrade by more effectively marketing the quality and usability of the product to developers, becoming a key sales tool for winning more deals.
The results of using Konfig were
Other benefits of using Konfig to generate their SDKs include
- Quicker time to market. If SnapTrade wanted to build out and maintain these SDKs themselves it would have taken them hundreds or thousands of engineering hours.
- Hands on support to get high-quality SDKs. Beyond technical speed, Konfig prioritizes the client experience at all times. Konfig linted and fixed errors in SnapTrade's OpenAPI spec and modified templates so SnapTrade was able to generate the exact SDKs that they wanted.
- No maintenance cost. Konfig integrates with SnapTrade's CD pipeline so SDKs are always up-to-date with API changes and any bugs or feature requests are handled by Konfig.
"A lot of the SDK's are in languages that our team has less experience with. In order to write these by hand we would have to learn the language syntax and spend hours compiling, debugging and reworking code. Konfig makes this process so much easier and faster."
Alex Sutherland, SnapTrade Developer
Conclusion
Today, over 50% of SnapTrade's customers use Konfig's SDKs to interact with their API. SnapTrade encourages all new customers to trial and onboard on to their API using our SDKs.
"Over 50% of our active customers are using SDK's. We are always encouraging the other half to try the SDK's, and as important, recommending ways for the half that are using them to use the SDK's more effectively. When we provide keys to prospective customers, we also let them know about the Online SDK to test out functionality."
Alex Sutherland, SnapTrade Developer