Centralized & Automated API Management
for HSBC with Kong APIOps
Client Overview
HSBC is one of the world’s largest and most prominent banking and financial services institutions, serving over 39 million customers across 60+ countries. Headquartered in London, the bank offers services in personal banking, corporate finance, global markets, and wealth management. HSBC is committed to driving digital innovation, enhancing cross-border experiences, and supporting sustainable growth through technology modernization.
Business Objective
To support its digital-first strategy, HSBC sought to establish a centralized, secure, and scalable API ecosystem to accelerate product delivery, increase automation, and foster internal API reuse. Their goal was to replace fragmented, team-specific gateways with a standardized API platform to:
- Process commission data and transaction records in real time
- Enable faster, more accurate financial forecasting
- Unify the developer experience for both APIs and UIs
- Transition to an API-as-a-Product (AaaP) operating model
- Promote APIs seamlessly across environments with minimal downtime
- Enforce governance, observability, and security standards across teams
Industry
Banking & Finance
Platform
Kong
Service
Kong Deployment Architecture
Challenges
Fragmented API Ecosystem
Each team had siloed API gateways with inconsistent governance, visibility, and no centralized platform for management or security.
Lack of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)
No automation or scripts existed for provisioning, tearing down, or promoting APIs between environments.
Scalability & SLA Demands
Need for tailored infrastructure per team with the ability to isolate traffic, control SLAs, and meet compliance standards.
Visibility Across Environments
No single control plane existed to monitor or manage API traffic or deployments across distributed data centers.
Edge Security & Compliance Goals
Future objectives included adopting MTLS for edge security and achieving FAPI compliance aligned with open banking standards.
Looking to move from fragmented APIs to centralised governance?
Explore Our Kong API Management ServicesSolutions
Distributed Kong Architecture
NeosAlpha designed and deployed Kong Data Planes within each business unit’s data center to enable infrastructure isolation and SLA-specific deployment.
Central Control Plane Deployment
A centralized Kong Control Plane was provisioned to orchestrate APIs across all data planes, providing full observability and unified governance.
SSO Integration with ADFS & LDAP
Enabled single sign-on in Kong Manager using secure directory service integration, ensuring seamless user management and audit trails.
Kong Deployment Automation with Ansible
Created reusable Ansible scripts for fully automated provisioning of Kong components, services, routes, plugins, and certificates.
APIOps Blueprint Implementation
Built a CI/CD framework to promote APIs automatically across dev, QA, staging, and production environments using declarative config.
MVP API Rollout & Training
Delivered and deployed four APIs as MVPs and onboarded internal HSBC teams to independently manage the new API Gateway stack.
Results
Automated API Deployment
Kong deployments are now fully script-driven, reducing provisioning times and operational errors.
Reduced Time-to-Market
APIs can be promoted across environments in minutes without service downtime, accelerating product delivery.
Centralized Visibility & Governance
A unified control plane monitors and governs APIs deployed across multiple regions and data centers.
Scalable, Secure Architecture
The infrastructure is compliant with HSBC’s internal security policies and ready for future enhancements, including MTLS and FAPI.
Technology Stack
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