The world’s first cross-border, open-architecture financial platform APIX leverages Equinix Metal ™ to boost infrastructure resilience and compliance
DigitalCFO Asia Newsroom | 17 August 2021
Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the world’s digital infrastructure company™, announced that the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN) would leverage Platform Equinix® to accelerate financial services innovation in Singapore and the global Fintech Ecosystem. This collaboration will:
- Provide a dedicated on-premise API Exchange (APIX) sandbox platform on Platform Equinix for financial institutions (FIs).
- Offer Fintechs a fast-provisioning and affordable, enterprise-grade, cloud-like, single tenanted hardware for production services.
Asia, and in particular, Southeast Asia, has seen a concerted push for greater digitization and financial inclusion in recent years. The market is well-plugged into the rising FinTech players who have seen record growth in transactions and investments in recent years. At the same time, the FIs from the region have also moved quickly to increase their digital footprint globally. Furthermore, there is an openness in collaboration between FIs and FinTechs, who are looking to leverage each other’s strengths to drive digital transformation. Therefore, it is key to have a robust digital bridge between FIs’ IT infrastructure and FinTechs’ cloud-native infrastructure.
To address these challenges, AFIN has collaborated with Equinix to provide FinTechs on APIX access to Platform Equinix and leveraged Equinix Metal to streamline and facilitate infrastructure connectivity and integration.
APIX is the world’s first cross-border, open-architecture API marketplace and sandbox for collaboration between FinTechs and financial institutions by ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN), a non-profit organization founded in 2018 by the ASEAN Bankers Association (ABA), International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). AMTD Foundation and Mastercard are AFIN’s Corporate Founding Members. APIX now hosts hundreds of FinTechs, FIs who are actively using APIX to run proof of concepts in a fail-safe environment.
The future of financial services is going to be open, instant, and everywhere. For greater financial innovation and inclusion to take place, co-creation needs to happen. Through our partnership with Equinix, AFIN believes that we will further reduce barriers to entry and time-to-market for FIs and FinTechs in Southeast Asia, paving the way for regional and global financial inclusivity in the future.
Pieter Franken, Special Advisor to the AFIN Board
According to the Global Interconnection Index (GXI) Vol. 4, a market study published by Equinix, the interconnection bandwidth for Financial Services & Payment Providers is expected to grow at 33% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2019 and 2023 in Asia-Pacific. This reflects the growing demand for FIs and FinTechs in the region to interconnect and deploy a digital core that enables digital exchange across borders.
APIX on Equinix Metal will enable FIs and FinTechs to deploy their sandboxes as well as production services on cloud-like single tenanted hardware. This secure enterprise-grade infrastructure provides banks and FIs with a consistent environment for digital twin experience and cloud to on-premise application lifecycle, all while strictly observing data sovereignty. At the same time, APIX on Equinix Metal offers proximity and adjacency to potential digital partners—cloud providers, internet service providers (ISPs), NSPs, content providers and enterprises—anywhere in a matter of minutes for performance and compliance reasons. This enables FIs and FinTechs to scale on-demand at speed and interconnect physically and virtually to Equinix’s unrivaled financial services ecosystem that consists of more than 1,800 networks, 3,000 cloud and IT service providers and 1,100 financial services companies across 64 global cities.
About Equinix
Equinix (Nasdaq: EQIX) is the world’s digital infrastructure company, enabling digital leaders to harness a trusted platform to bring together and interconnect the foundational infrastructure that powers their success. Equinix enables today’s businesses to access all the right places, partners and possibilities they need to accelerate advantage. With Equinix, they can scale with agility, speed the launch of digital services, deliver world-class experiences and multiply their value.
