Envestnet | Yodlee uses Postman to Get Customers Testing as Fast as Possible

Read the Envestnet | Yodlee case study.

Envestnet | Yodlee is a FinTech company serving tens of millions of consumers through a cloud-based API used by the majority of U.S. banks and financial advisors. Envestnet | Yodlee customers are developers who work for banks, financial institutions, and fintech companies.

Envestnet | Yodlee’s two most popular products are an API to aggregate accounts so financial advisors can get a complete picture of their customers assets, and an API to confirm the existence of a bank account. Together these are a starting point for developers nurturing their own fintech ideas.

With so many customers ranging from the extremely technical to not-at-all-technical, Envestnet | Yodlee relies on Postman to help bridge communication gaps and get developers testing as soon as possible.

Envestnet | Yodlee offers two Postman collections:

• One Postman Collection with 63 endpoints—for developers who want more in-depth information
• One Postman Collection with 5 endpoints—for developers who want to get started working with the API immediately.

“I know developers love to test first and read later, so my goal is to help developers make test calls within five minutes and become successful. They want to get up and running right away”

Vu Nguyen, Envestnet | Yodlee Evangelist.

Creating both a basic Postman collection and a comprehensive collection has helped Envestnet | Yodlee serve two communities – developers who want to start immediately, and those who want more in-depth information.

The collections focus on examples that give developers direct access to an endpoint. Envestnet | Yodlee uses Postman scripts that dynamically generate bearer tokens when an endpoint is called – which is a task usually done with code. Envestnet | Yodlee does it in Postman with a clever use of scripts. The encoded JSON web tokens are created and stored locally in Postman, and can be decoded using https://jwt.io/.

“Keep it simple—straight to the point. Add screenshots. Your grandma should be able to figure it out” – Vu Nguyen, Envestnet | Yodlee.

Building a FinTech application with Postman

One of the challenges facing a data aggregator like Envestnet | Yodlee is the very large number of data sources they use. There are more than 20,000 data sources in 15 countries that can be involved in accessing bank accounts. Envestnet | Yodlee has a login application called FastLink that does all the heavy lifting of account access.

Once you connect an account in FastLink, you can use Postman to make calls. Users can take a JSON response from Postman, convert it to CSV, and use that to display information in a user-friendly format which is why non-technical users love it. Envestnet | Yodlee can even use AI and machine learning to clarify data around vendors and transactions, including categorization and merchant location details.

“Postman is my cheatcode- I add an endpoint and it spits out all the information I need in seconds.“

Vu Nguyen, Envestnet | Yodlee.

Envestnet | Yodlee Uses Postman at Hackathons

Envestnet | Yodlee regularly joins hackathons like the ones at the annual Money20/20 event in Las Vegas. They share their finished Postman Collections with hackathon participants—allowing developers to build their proofs of concept quickly and without language and time barriers.

Less technical customers such as business analysts and product managers, use Postman to get ramped up quickly and demo technical products to their clients.

“On the API-end, Postman has been a great tool to help us demo Envestnet | Yodlee endpoints to both technical and non-technical (clients, showing how our APIs return secured bank-level data in real time.”

Vu Nguyen, Envestnet | Yodlee.

Postman is a universal language, it makes it easy to tell the story

Postman collections can be accessed via the Envestnet | Yodlee Developer Portal.

You can also view and run the Envestnet | Yodlee API on the Postman API Network.