MAS plans to offer data through APIs

THE Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said on Wednesday it plans to make available its data through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs).

APIs reduce the time to market, and the cost of maintenance, said Lawrence Ang, head of IT at MAS, at a two-day conference jointly organised by the central bank and the Association of Banks in Singapore.

There are no compliance issues or data leakage since these pieces of data are already available for the public, he said. Currently, information is mainly published in data sets in the form of spreadsheets.

APIs are sets of requirements - routines and protocols - issued by a business or institution that determine how one application can communicate with another. For example, a Google Maps API lets app developers embed Google Maps in Web pages.