The Tool Desk
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What a bank API connects—and why it matters
An API lets one software system request data or actions from another. Banks use APIs in customer-facing apps, partner integrations, and internal services. Those connections can make services work together, including sharing customer-permissioned data, but they also create routes through which data or functions must be protected.
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The key question is not whether a bank has an API, but whether each request is authenticated, authorized for the specific data and action, limited appropriately, and monitored. A valid login alone does not guarantee that a user should be able to access every account, field, or operation.
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How API weaknesses can affect customers and services
Identity and authorization failures
Broken authentication can let an attacker compromise a token or take over another user’s identity. Even when a user is correctly identified, authorization can fail at several levels:
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- Object-level: A request changes an account or transaction identifier and receives another person’s data because the API does not verify permission for that specific object. OWASP advises checking every function that accesses a data source using a user-supplied ID.
- Property-level: The API reveals or permits changes to fields the caller should not be able to read or edit.
- Function-level: A caller can invoke an operation—such as a privileged administrative function—that their role should not allow.
These failures can threaten confidentiality or integrity: information may be disclosed, or data and actions may be altered without proper authority.
Availability and business-flow abuse
Unrestricted resource consumption can allow excessive requests to consume computing capacity or incur charges for paid services. Separately, automated abuse of a legitimate business flow can cause harm even when each individual request is technically valid. Either pattern may disrupt service or impose operational costs.
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Configuration, inventory, and third-party connections
Security misconfiguration can leave an API exposed or protected inadequately. Poor inventory management makes it harder to find undocumented, forgotten, or deprecated endpoints and ensure they receive the same oversight as current ones. An API that consumes a third party’s data can also inherit risk if it trusts that input without appropriate validation.
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Server-side request forgery
If an API fetches a remote resource based on a user-supplied address without validating it, an attacker may be able to make the server send requests to unintended destinations. This is known as server-side request forgery.
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Financial-sector risks extend beyond data theft
The Basel Committee’s 2019 report on open banking and APIs links API adoption to greater sharing of customer-permissioned data and connectivity among financial-service providers. It identifies potential issues including data breaches, misuse, falsification, denial of service, unencrypted login, infrastructure malfunction, man-in-the-middle attacks, token compromise, and IP address spoofing. These are risk scenarios, not evidence that every bank has experienced them.
The risks span several dimensions: identity and authorization determine who may act; data exposure and integrity concern what can be seen or changed; availability concerns whether services remain usable; inventory and configuration affect whether endpoints are adequately protected; and third-party connections create boundaries where consent and trust must be managed.
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What the published evidence can—and cannot—say
OWASP’s 2023 API Security Top 10 is an awareness taxonomy for API risks, not a bank-specific prevalence study. OWASP’s API Security team says its public call for data “did not result in data that would have enabled a relevant statistical analysis of the most common API security issues.” Its rankings therefore should not be read as a measured rate of flaws in banks or as proof that banking APIs are more vulnerable than APIs in other sectors.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchThe available sources establish categories of potential weakness and financial-sector concerns, but they do not establish a current bank API vulnerability rate, incident count, or comparison with public expectations. A risk list can help explain what to look for; it cannot quantify how often those failures occur.
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How banks can reduce and detect API risk
The Basel Committee’s 2019 report describes controls used by some banks. They are examples of risk-management approaches, not a universal baseline or a guarantee that an API is secure.
Preventive controls
- Restrict access privileges so users and systems can reach only the data and functions they need.
- Use authentication and authorized end-to-end encryption to protect identity and data in transit.
- Apply token expiration so credentials do not remain usable indefinitely.
- Use firewalls and, where appropriate, IP allowlisting to limit access paths.
Testing, visibility, and accountability
- Test APIs for vulnerabilities and review whether authorization checks cover each object, field, and function.
- Keep audit trails that make relevant access and actions traceable.
- Monitor for API-related cyber incidents so suspicious activity can be detected and investigated.
Lifecycle management
Inventory management is essential alongside technical controls: organizations need to know which endpoints exist, who owns them, what data or actions they expose, and whether older interfaces are still needed. Third-party integrations also require oversight of what is shared and how returned data is handled.
The Basel report stated in 2019 that no globally adopted API standard existed at that time. That is a dated observation, not a description of current requirements in every jurisdiction; applicable standards and rules depend on location and should be checked against current local guidance.
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API weaknesses are primarily a matter for the organizations that build and operate the interfaces. The risk categories explain why banks must enforce permissions beyond login, protect tokens and data, manage endpoint inventories, and watch for abuse. They do not show that a particular bank is insecure, nor do they provide a way for a customer to identify a flaw from outside.
For customers, the practical distinction is between a real risk category and a claim about prevalence. OWASP and the Basel Committee describe credible failure modes and safeguards; neither source establishes that bank APIs are generally more vulnerable than people expect.
Quick Recap
Sources
- OWASP API Security Top 10 – 2023
- OWASP API Security Top 10 – 2023 Introduction
- OWASP API Security Project
- Basel Committee, “Report on open banking and application programming interfaces (APIs)” (2019)
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