Monetizing the invisible layer

Title Monetizing the Invisible Layer Why APIs Become the Business Model

The APIdays 2025 conference in Paris provided a thought-provoking experience for attendees, focusing on the future of digital business. The event brought together architects, engineers, banking and fintech executives, and platform strategists from around the world.

Unlike many technology conferences that focus on hype and trends, this forum centered on a single theme as digital experiences evolve, business models must adapt to keep pace.

Sessions explored topics such as digital trust, open banking, embedded finance, and the rise of instruction-based and automated interfaces as primary customer touchpoints. The message was clear customers are moving away from manual interactions and toward simple, natural commands issued through digital channels. The key question for enterprises is no longer if this will happen, but whether their infrastructure is ready to support it.

APIs become the business model

One keynote speaker, RCBC Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Inclusion Officer Lito Villanueva, succinctly captured this shift If GenAI becomes the new interface, then APIs become the business model. This statement redirected the conversation from the visible front end to the less visible but crucial integration layer underneath.

Market narratives often focus on front-end tools and interfaces as the primary differentiators. However, Villanueva's remark highlighted the importance of the infrastructure that connects those interfaces to trusted systems of record, handling money, identity, and risk.

Without a robust API layer, digital experiences remain cosmetic rather than transformational. Digital channels cannot move funds, verify identities, assess credit, or detect fraud without being connected to regulated systems operated by banks, telcos, government agencies, and large enterprises.

RCBC's API-first direction

RCBC's recent strategy in the Philippines demonstrates this thinking in action. The bank has advanced its digital transformation agenda by opening over 10 public APIs across various areas, including payments, account onboarding, and financial services. These APIs allow third-party organizations to embed financial capabilities directly into their own platforms and applications.

This shift enables increased transaction volumes, new usage-based monetization models, and deeper integration into partners' products and customer journeys. The end customer receives more seamless services, often without consciously engaging with the bank's branded channels.

Governance, risk, and APIwiz

However, exposing APIs is only the starting point. Scaling them securely and efficiently presents a more complex challenge.

As organizations grow, they must address recurring issues such as version control, partner onboarding, access control, documentation quality, security enforcement, and ownership clarity across teams and business units.

Without disciplined management, API portfolios can quickly become fragmented. Duplicate services proliferate, governance becomes uneven, and visibility declines. This not only impacts operational efficiency but also introduces security and compliance risks.

APIwiz provides a unified environment to design and document APIs, publish and manage them across environments, observe usage and performance, and enforce governance and security policies at scale.

By centralizing these capabilities, the platform reduces the likelihood of shadow APIs, unclear ownership, and unmanaged endpoints. Everything is traceable and structured, creating conditions for reliable, safe, and scalable exposure of core services to partners.

Implications for Philippine enterprises

The themes raised at APIdays 2025 carry clear implications for Philippine businesses, particularly small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Traditionally, SMEs have struggled with integration. They may have strong offerings and local market insight but lack the technical capability and capital to connect to financial and data systems at enterprise level. Well-designed and well-governed APIs lower this barrier.

Concrete opportunities include marketplaces offering salary advances or working capital products to riders, sellers, and partners, and lending and credit services validating identity and financial data in near real-time.

When trust, compliance, and security are encoded into the infrastructure, innovation becomes more widely accessible. Smaller players can participate in sophisticated financial and data ecosystems without recreating core infrastructure from scratch.

Competing in the next phase

The critical competitive decisions today are being made at the infrastructure level, often out of sight of the end customer. Emerging interfaces will undoubtedly change how people interact with services. However, it is the readiness of the API layer – secure, governed, observable, and monetizable – that will determine which institutions can adapt and scale.

Villanueva's statement identifies a strategic pivot point as interfaces become more automated and embedded, the business model moves into the API layer. Organizations that recognize and act on this early will not merely participate in the next phase of digital commerce – they will define its standards and shape its value chains.

About the Author

Kay Calpo Lugtu is the chief operating officer of Hungry Workhorse, a digital and culture transformation firm. Her advocacies include food innovation, nation-building, and sustainability. She may be reached at [email protected].

Note I made minor adjustments to sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation to improve readability and clarity. Additionally, I added a brief bio for the author at the end of the blog post.

Edward Lance Arellano Lorilla

CEO / Co-Founder

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