Banking-as-a-Service platform Avenu sees Partner Workspaces accelerate integration from 3 months to 2 weeks

Postman was the first choice from a development and quality engineering perspective because Avenu is a solution platform that consists of microservices. Key team members had prior positive experiences of using Postman. Avenu's work encompasses greenfield development, which involves the creation of brand-new products. With no existing codebase to build upon, Avenu recognized the need for an integrated solution that would enable it to maintain strong momentum to bring its platform to market.

Without Postman, developers would have to use complex cURL commands in the cloud for API testing. Avenu initially used Postman for functional testing, but it soon became apparent that it could be used for other types of testing.

Effective collaboration between partners was a priority to facilitate the development of financial solutions. Avenu identified that it needed an API platform that prevented duplication of work and expedited development. Additionally, it strongly preferred an API platform that could eliminate the burden of translating code.

Moving to the Enterprise plan significantly enhanced API development, testing, QA, client implementation and validation phases. Avenu relies on Postman for its collaboration capabilities, which has helped in many areas.

“The Postman Enterprise plan and Partner Workspaces are key to our evolving success story. Workspaces allow easy developer collaboration and prevent work duplication. Our team's life is now easier.”

Krishna Challa, Senior Vice President Of Engineering, Avenu

Postman Collections are the basis of all API work. Avenu teams invest time in enhancing the quality of each collection by documenting all possible parameters. API documentation plays an important role as everything needs to be clear and user-friendly for clients.

Developers use Postman as a frontend, and in the absence of complex cURL commands, processes that once took hours are completed in seconds. Postman is an essential part of the process for major feature development and is also vital for the engineering team, which is responsible for production operations.

“The wow moment is watching the dollar transaction being processed using Postman. I can see how APIs provide an excellent customer user experience.”

Todd Youngren, President, Avenu

Postman is instrumental in onboarding new team members. Training begins with the self-discovery of APIs, by providing access to existing collections. Following this, team members move on to running APIs and understanding the request and response formats.

The ability to share work between developers, the QA team, and the implementation team across different environments is particularly advantageous. Collections can be quickly published and distributed to relevant teams, and committed to GitHub.

“Postman is the language shared between teams, including QA, implementation, client developer and operations support. It's the complete package, an important cross-functional collaboration tool.”

Krishna Challa, Senior Vice President Of Engineering, Avenu

Code and scripts are written in Postman and then customized to meet testing needs across functions. It provides a framework to build pre-request scripts, providing the flexibility for out-of-the-box thinking to modify test data that has been generated. The real-time data from the request can then be interpreted and formulated.

Specifically, Postman is used for creating unit test cases, along with the verification and testing of third-party APIs. Avenu consumes a significant number of third-party APIs. These external APIs are exported into Postman, where it's quick and easy to start testing and get up and running.

“Postman facilitates technical collaboration which is important to us. We can quickly troubleshoot client issues without touching code.”

Brian Bretz, Director of Product Management, Avenu

Collaboration and sharing are key for QA to achieve robust product quality. For example, the same collection can be tested in multiple environments, from development to the sandbox to production. Using environment files to represent each test environment makes it possible to switch files while utilizing the same collection.

The QA team uses Postman for many types of testing, including functional, regression, load and performance. One of the primary benefits of using Postman is the ability to generate random values and switch between input types, for example, using XML or JSON for endpoints requiring data attachments.

Onboarding clients is effortless with API documentation. One of the first platforms clients are given access to is Postman. It's a priority when onboarding clients and jump-starts the integration process.

“Doing what I do without Postman would be like driving a car without an engine. For example, our clients love Partner Workspaces because they are extremely organized.”

Daniel Van Nostrand, Integration Support Manager, Avenu

Partner Workspaces are particularly important for the Implementation team when working with clients. Clients leverage Postman to start interfacing with their APIs. Each client has a separate workspace, which allows multiple companies to be supported. There is a clear separation of responsibilities for teams.

A custom collection of calls created by the Development team is shared with the client. The client uses the collection in the sandbox during integration. Now, support-related information requests and asks have been dramatically reduced. Non-developers can even use Postman for testing and support.

“Postman is a Rosetta Stone for our enterprise partners. Collections jump-start their understanding of our services, and they can convert requests to their preferred dev language.”

Brian Bretz, Director of Product Management, Avenu

One of the most significant benefits of Postman is the ability to convert requests to the client's preferred language, which keeps the relationship frictionless. Both clients and Avenu teams can focus on innovating with APIs.

Developing a brand new API previously involved a two-week sprint cycle but is now completed in two days.

“Postman provides a visual representation of APIs which are an intangible idea. Now, we can see the call in action. Postman is an end-to-end solution for Avenu covering everything.”

Daniel Van Nostrand, Integration Support Manager, Avenu

Where integration would take three months, it is now completed in two weeks. Postman reduced the time of transactions for clients from weeks to almost instantaneous. Clients have immediate access to a preconfigured environment and can get started straight away.

Many processes have been expedited. For example, creating a new API endpoint would take two days but now takes four hours. There is no need for cURL commands, often resulting in hours of trial and error. Now, using Postman as the frontend, the same process takes seconds.

Custom test cases can be formulated in a few hours, satisfying several business requirements. In the past, test cases could take up to two days to customize. Automation has decreased the time for a successful run for user acceptance testing from three hours to ten minutes. Whereas UAT testing time has been reduced from four days to 10 minutes.

The Integration Support team exclusively used Partner Workspaces. Compared to alternative methods, the time to value for testing and client onboarding is at least five to six times faster with Postman.

The Implementation team has saved lag time by removing the need to request devs or QA to test. Being able to self-serve tests saves time. It's easy to troubleshoot client problems in the relevant sandbox to isolate issues using calls and the console.

“Our Customer Success Manager is amazing and always responsive. The knowledge and support we receive on the Postman Enterprise plan has accelerated our success. We love Postman.”

Krishna Challa, Senior Vice President Of Engineering, Avenu

It's not just the platform that has brought benefits to Avenu. The teams have optimized operations using the latest features through the support of a dedicated Customer Success Manager.