- What’s at stake: U.S. Bank added a generative AI assistant to its developer portal for business customers and partners to find and deploy APIs.
- Supporting data: The new assistant speeds up the time to implement APIs by weeks.
- Forward look: Other banks have developer portals, but none have AI assistants.
U.S. Bank has launched a generative AI assistant for its developer portal, the place where business customers and partners can find banking services that they can embed into their applications and websites, such as deposits, investments and mortgages. The new assistant helps them find and use the right application programming interfaces.
Hundreds of clients and partners use the developer portal, which was launched in 2019, and thousands of developers log in and use it, according to the bank.
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The new developer assistant is intended to speed up the average time it takes customers to implement its APIs by weeks, according to Ankit Bhatt, chief digital officer consumer of small business and platforms at U.S. Bank. The assistant also promotes best practices such as account tokenization and validation to help clients use its APIs securely.
“Speed to market is really important,” Bhatt told American Banker. “And there’s a lot of reliability, so it reduces errors. And the tool itself helps you identify the errors and solve those errors.” As a result, the virtual assistant can help developers be more productive and obtain higher quality code, Bhatt said.
The assistant, which lets users type questions into a ChatGPT-like interface, also simply helps developers find what they need, Bhatt said.
“If you are a corporate payment organization looking to integrate payments, you can go in and see payment APIs,” Bhatt said. But it might not be obvious which authentication APIs should be used with them. “This helps developers at companies that have a relationship with U.S. Bank discover our capabilities.”
The assistant, which was quietly rolled out last October but has not yet been announced, has access to all of the bank’s APIs, testing scripts, self-service guidelines and API documentation. It can help with technical matters like documentation, integration recommendations and guidance, he said. If a user gets an error message, the assistant will explain what is happening and help fix the problem. Along with self-service, the assistant provides access to support staff.
Other banks, including Wells Fargo and Citi, also have portals that let clients and partners access their APIs. But U.S. Bank appears to be the first bank to offer a gen AI-based assistant for external developers. Spokespeople at the four other banks declined to comment.
“I haven’t heard of another bank doing this, but Stripe’s been ahead of this curve,” said Alenka Grealish, lead analyst on emerging tech at Celent. In March, Stripe launched an AI assistant that helps developers retrieve documentation on Stripe APIs.
In addition to APIs, U.S. Bank’s portal gives developers a test environment to try out new services. There’s an Elavon-specific version of the portal for card partners (Elavon is a payment processing company that U.S. Bank owns.)
Bhatt declined to share which existing large language model was used to create the developer assistant, but emphasized that it is gated.
“It’s not scanning the internet and telling you what’s the best API out there,” Bhatt said. “It’s within our dev portal.”
In the future, U.S. Bank may add agentic capability to the developer assistant. That way, if a company wants to accept payments and authenticate and invoice customers, for instance, AI will do the transaction mapping.
“So you go from one-to-one integration to many-to-one integration,” Bhatt said. “Ultimately, it’s about speed to market, it’s about the quality of the output, whatever experience the developer is looking to integrate, and making it easier for them to consume that.”
Also on the drawing board: Bhatt’s team is working on integrating the developer assistant with users’ own development environments. That means developers won’t need to come to the bank’s portal to discover its APIs – they can find them in their own developer environment.
“Banks are beginning to experiment with enabling engineers to query APIs and documentation in natural language – similar to using a chatbot to explore capabilities, examples, and how to use the API endpoints,” John Ratzan, data and AI lead and financial services managing director at Accenture, told American Banker. “While public APIs with live AI search aren’t yet mainstream, behind the scenes banks are actively rolling out enterprise search over internal API inventories, documentation and developer portals at scale.”