Why Did Kyriba Build an App Marketplace?

Kyriba’s decision to build an app marketplace came from a desire to provide our customers with the latest technology, while fostering innovation in the API space. As organizations’ needs shift and evolve, we want to ensure that all those needs are addressed—whether through our own capabilities or through technology developed by our partners.

Creating a Marketplace

Providing a platform offering is an important strategic step to deliver value for customers. It is also a commitment both to clients and ecosystem partners. More and more marketplaces are being offered in different lines of businesses. The most famous example is probably the the Apple App Store; while Apple hosts the platform, most of the available applications are offered by app developers or ecosystem partners.

The role of Apple can be described as a gardener. A gardener might seed some of the plants, but their main role is to tend to the garden and ensure that over time it can grow. Gardener companies usually do not build every application by themselves, yet their platforms offer more extensive application experience than other vendors in the same sector, because they curate the marketplace for quality and content with attention to both consumer and developer experience optimization.

In contrast, app developers are more like builders, laying the bricks and hiring workers for a new building. Builder companies create every product and feature by themselves. Often the speed for innovation hits a bottleneck, especially as the market, competition and client requirements change.

Kyriba’s Open Platform Strategy

Understanding such difference, Kyriba decided on a unique marketplace strategy. Kyriba strives to be a gardener that supports and tends to the ecosystem, ensuring there is a right balance to support its growth. We believe that the broader community can solve specific market problems or meet specific client requirements and it is thus important to enable the community to unleash its innovativeness on the Kyriba platform.

Meanwhile, Kyriba shall invest its main resources in improving the core product offering and the infrastructure to ensure top-notch experience around building and using apps. The launch of the Kyriba Developer Portal in 2021 marked the first step towards our vision of creating a marketplace, where fintech partners, enterprise clients, and global banks can come together to build brand new experience for corporate finance, fully integrated on one open platform.

For over 20 years, Kyriba has been a highly customizable platform that serves business needs for CFOs, treasurers, and other financial functions, with over 10,000 ERP instances connected to the platform and 2.4 billion bank transactions processed by the platform annually. Now that organizations have a fast-growing number of connected systems, data points and technology stacks, many customers have additional requirements to extend the capabilities of their applications. Even more importantly, these requirements often vary from client to client. That’s why Kyriba must allow fast-track product expansion and feature enrichment to meet such growing client demand. Under the marketplace strategy, Kyriba offers two pillars APIs and marketplace apps.

APIs Connecting Modern Platforms

The general availability of majority of Kyriba application via APIs allows both the clients as well as broader ecosystem to add custom workflows, add and extract data as well orchestrate capabilities as part of a broader workflow of their choice. APIs are a common way to connect modern platforms, and Kyriba offers an industry leading suite of APIs to enable the ecosystem.

The App Marketplace comes in when customization through APIs becomes too big of an undertaking or is better served by a 3rd party provider connector. By allowing third party providers such as consultants and software vendors to create these connectors, Kyriba provides them an access to its global client base to monetize their innovation, meanwhile saves the effort for the customers to discover innovative solutions from a broader ecosystem.

These apps can also be much more than just data connectors. Their goal is to seamlessly connect their services into Kyriba, extending the product reach. Kyriba is a well-recognized award-winning treasury platform, and we want to provide our clients best-in-class providers in adjacent areas, be it funding and investment, FP&A, Payroll and other finance functions.

A Win-Win-Win for Clients, Partners, and Kyriba

By allowing the ecosystem to build out and around the Kyriba application, platform can organically grow, adding industry, geography and use case specific features that are truly best-in-class for specific niche problems. Simultaneously, by reducing the strain on the product roadmap, Kyriba’s engineering and product team can work on core product offering, improving the API layer and the user and developer experience. It is a win-win-win for clients, ecosystem partners, and Kyriba.

Come and check out the Kyriba Marketplace, together we can grow the liquidity network into a finance ecosystem through robust API integrations.