Experience on Banking API Integration

Financial institutes always try to make their system most secured. Banking APIs also need secured environment for development. Just passed a whole month working on some banking API integration work in a system developed in PHP. So, I needed to integrate those APIs using PHP. Most of the banks or money transferring agencies uses webservices for interaction with third parties now-a-days. But, some are still using ftp still now.

When I got involved with that task, I figured out that, this task is about to impossible for me to complete. I never heard about these things "Webservice", "WSDL" or "SOAP". But I was familiar with RPC (Remote Process Call). Thanks to Google, it helped me lot to find articles about these technologies. I started reading from SOAP & WSDL and then studied about available PHP/webservice development tools. That was the first time I used CURL for sending http request over Internet. Slowly assembled required codes for sending a SOAP request and handling the response. Then started work for the assignment. My client wanted to use the service from another International Financial Organization using webservices. Usually admins of webservice server provides the documentation about the standard http request structure and the requirements. It's easier to work with well-documented systems. That organization required predefined ip address from where the SOAP request comes and a SSL certificate which is provided by the admin. They provided me a .p12 SSL, but PHP cannot handle this format of certificate. PHP supports only .pem format of SSL certificate. I had to convert the .p12 SSL into key.pem and cert.pem with a pass key for key.pem. Then added them with the PHP CURL request codes. But, still it was too time consuming to write xml texts for the request. That time I started to use nuSOAP library which made everything easier to do. It generates xml as the requesting webservice function needs.

nuSOAP library is the best tools for handling SOAP/WSDL development using PHP. SOAP/WSDL helps different systems to interact each other.