apidays Singapore on 15-16 April 2025 shared new innovations and best practices on the theme “Where APIs meet AI: Building tomorrow's intelligent ecosystems”.
On Day 1, The New Tech Organisation track explored how leaders and teams align business and technology, foster an engineering culture, build skills and innovate in a fast changing technology environment. Aaron Tan Dani, Chairman & Co-Founder of IASA Asia Pacific described how to ensure that faster AI-enabled delivery doesn’t contribute to more Technical and Architectural debt. Lito Villanueva, Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation & Inclusion Officer, at RCBC in The Philippines, shared his experience in transforming an institution into a tech-first, agile bank. Keith Carter, Partner at KDA Capabilities, moderated a panel comprising Alberto Resco Perez, Senior Director of Software Engineering at Singtel, Picklu Paul, Senior Engineering Leader at Grab, and Thidahack Tranvankeoith, Managing Director ISAP at CACIB. The panel had a deeply productive conversation about the future of tech departments, AI collaboration, and how we scale meaningful careers in a changing world.
Technical tracks included Platform Engineering, the DevOps Toolchain and Cybersecurity.
Day 2 continued with tracks on the symbiotic relationship between APIs and AI, and deeper dives on Data Architecture, Data Engineering, Async APIs. Strong industry applications of APIs were explored for both financial services and telecommunications.
Of special note were keynotes by apidays founder Mehdi Medjaoui and IDC's Director (Research) Asia Financial Insights, Ashish Kakar. Mehdi's keynote revisited the 2003 mandate that transformed Amazon from a successful e-commerce merchant to a dominant player in the cloud computing market. He posited that organisations today need to apply a similar mandate to ensure that AI is applied across the organisation consistently and sustainably at scale.
Ashish Kakar's keynote traced the how APIs are enabling financial inclusion across Asia, and the opportunities for banks and insurers in leveraging APIs to extend new and existing services to previously under-served markets.
Rahul Bhargava, Founder at Avivate & Consultant at World Bank, moderated a panel discussion on The Future of Payments. Panel members Guillaume Cordina, Executive Director and Head, Open Banking & Platforms at Standard Chartered, Max Sadlowski, Solutions Director at Wise, and Jeremy Tan, CEO at Liquid Group, Chair of Payments Subcommittee at Singapore Fintech Association,
discussed the role of standards and public/private dialogue in harmonising the integration of regional payments networks to simplify cross-border transactions.
Across the two days, notable technical presentations included:
- Jakub (Kuba) Rusicka, CPTO at eyos, presented a case study on replatforming a complex, disjointed ecosystem into a unified, API-first platform
- Bipin K., Head of API Management at Autodesk, presented lessons learned from managing 10s of thousands in TPS in a cross-cloud architecture with high availability
- Anbarasan Nagalingam, Cloud Architect at Equinix, and Karthi Chandrasekaran, API Architect at Great Eastern, explored how bias—like unfair loan denials—sneaks into AI and demonstrated a loan approval API live, showing biased vs fair outcomes.
- Arthi Jaganathan and Akhil Bhaskar from AWS gave us insights on the 2025 best practices of building APIs that are fast, monetised and secured by solid cyber practices like observability and threat detection.
- Mohammad Asif from MunichRe on going from having data of uncertain quality and timeliness to speedier and more complete and more accurate data with AI-enabled APIs.
Beyond the presentations, attendees interacted across alternative formats including:
- Our sponsor workshops dived deep into API Management and AI Gateways.
- The Women in APIs breakfast included roundtable discussions sharing stories on encouraging women to build their careers, and creating a safe space where more voices can be heard.
- The executive lunch, an informal peer-to-peer gathering for senior leaders to discuss opportunities of the new API stack for LLMs, and how to address the new challenges to security, governance, and policy.
- Tech Talks Unleashed paired developers with leading industry experts to explore the business use cases and implementation of GSMA’s Open Gateway APIs for customer identity verification and fraud prevention.
Our co-located conference GreenIO Singapore explored the sustainability challenges of IT itself.
A comment from attendee Somdutt Sharma sums up the experience:
“It was a privilege to reconnect with colleagues, former peers, customers, and industry partners—each contributing to a dynamic and forward-looking conversation around the evolving API ecosystem. These are the moments where ideas spark action.”