By FINTECH Books Contributor, Natasha Kyprianides    Follow: @natashakyp Innovation within financial services by FinTechs only seems to have brought about a user experience breakthrough so far, rather than a true industry disruption. Innovators in banking shouldn’t be focused on tweaking existing technology and products to perfection. That’s just the commoditization approach. Let’s take Uber as a good example of a single company that has managed to disrupt an entire industry. The method rests on one principle: The API economy. The “Application Program Interface” (API) specifies how software components should interact and is used when programming graphical user interface (GUI) components. Making Uber’s services possible requires a lot of highly complex components to be orchestrated into an app. It would necessitate a great investment in time and budget to develop eachof them from scratch. Specialised players can provide the functions of every one of these components and make them available to other companies via APIs. Now, how can this correlate to banking? By choosing to take full advantage of the possibilities that PSD2 opens up, banks could effortlessly deliver new products and services to customers while boosting revenues by adopting one or a combination of all three main open API strategies: Bank as a marketplace Bank as a facilitator Bank as a service This principle is comparable with the concept of a smartphone device and its open mobile operating system that acts as an enabler for 3rd parties to build apps and become part of this ecosystem for mutual benefit. Similarly, a bank can offer these 3rd party products/services attached to its core through an exclusive app store. An API-first approach can drive digital transformation in banking and empower a developer ecosystem. A true partnership between banks and FinTechs through open APIs will bring novel products and services to the market and make an impact on the way we live.