API Evangelist Conversation with Heather Xiao, Founder and CEO at Horizon Zero Ltd

Hello there, Kin Lane, API Evangelist here for another API Evangelist conversation where I bring in folks who are doing interesting things with APIs to share more about what they’re up to. So let’s see who we’ve got here today. Hello there, who are you?

Hi, hi Kin, how are you?

I’m good, how are you? Who are you, what do you do, Heather?

I am the founder and CEO of a new company called Horizon Zero. I do research, consulting and training on the strategy of open banking, open finance and smart data, and also I aspire to be an advocate for it as well.

Yes, we’ve known each other for a while and we’re always sharing stories about standards and the banking industry and data and whatnot. But for the audience, share a little bit of your background. What brought you here to found this company and do what you’re doing right now?

Yeah, thank you, Kin. Indeed we have known each other for, I think, for 10 years. So you’ve been API hero for 10 years and for me many years as well. I’m really, I feel privileged to be in your podcast, and thank you for inviting me. So I have been in the API, open banking, open finance world for the past decade or even longer, and I have been working in the API field and later open banking field in different business sectors. So for example, at the earlier stage I was the head of API for Qantas, then that exposes me to the open concept. Then I have been working with several banks in Australia, and also back to the UK since 2019, to basically work on progressing open banking. And most recently I was the chief product officer at OBIE, so right now it’s called Open Banking Limited, responsible for the trust framework, for the resilience of the product, and also on business development to advocate open banking and how it will help our business and help our customers to create, to have better life experiences.

So you, we’ve done a lot of talking about open banking over the years. You’ve seen it from the early days to now where it’s really maturing and governments are behind it, there’s a lot moving and being done as far as open banking. But you’re really focused on something that I want to talk about, and we will do another episode on just open banking, but this one you’re very focused on what’s called smart data. What do you mean by smart data?

Yeah, smart data actually is a UK term, and right now in the UK we are working on, actually we have a lot of energy to progress smart data. And smart data basically is an extension, in my view, of open banking and open finance. So there are open banking, open finance and smart data, all about securely sharing customer data. So open banking focuses on the payment sector only. So payment initiation, account information, and using those services to support small businesses and consumers and to create innovation. Open finance enlarges this into the holistic financial services sector. Then smart data makes it even further. So not only does it focus on financial services, it also broadens the service, the innovation, into sectors like education, health, transport, energy, etc. So it actually has a much bigger scope, but it will deliver much more profound customer experience transformation, I believe.

So it sounds like it’s about, you come, you were working in the airline industry, you working payments, you’re like cross-cutting across industries. But would you say this is also about more empathy for the human beings and the people who are using this data, or this data represents?

You are absolutely right. So the core of smart data or open banking is about data belongs to the customer, customer owns their data and they should control their data, and data should render more and better experiences for the customers. And in my view smart data will profoundly transform our human experiences. So imagine, if we think about a current industry, they all stem from the human needs, right? For example financial services or transport or health, they all, because we have a need to rely on the industry to make our life better. But now with the new technology, new emerging technologies, or new business models, for example open banking or smart data, it uses the emerging technology to see what other possibilities we can achieve by using those emerging technologies, so that we can build more innovative services through better leveraging of the data.

So would you say this actually provides more incentives for business leadership to do APIs, open finance, smart data, is that there’s more revenue opportunities in there if we actually pay attention to what matters to the consumer and what they care about, there’s more ways that we can make money?

It’s a very, very good question, Kin, and I think in the short term, whether smart data can create more incentive for the businesses, for the industry, is a key challenge for us to work on, to focus on, to really enable the industry to have the environment to continuously innovate, at the same time realize business values. And I feel this is going to increasingly become the reality, because smart data is about creating the new services which we would rely on the business to create, to innovate, and so that I think new opportunities will emerge more and more as we build out more and more success.

Yeah, I think it’s, I mean, you and I have talked about this for years, that’s why you do APIs, is because it opens you up to your consumers, you listen to them, you have more empathy about what they need, there’s feedback loops, and you’re able to better deliver services to them. But what smart data seems to be opening up is that cross-cutting, now there’s opportunities across different areas of your life. And would you say these things become more meaningful once, I mean, it’s fine if it’s a payment, but if it’s a payment for my children’s wedding or some other more meaningful thing, do you feel like that’s just better for everybody if we focus at that level?

Absolutely. I think if we look back, when we have been working on open banking user adoption, customer adoption, it has been a good success so far, absolutely, but at the same time it has been a challenge, because in my view open banking only focuses on one area, which is payment. But customer experience, when you talk about, that we create a new good customer experience for a wedding platform for example, it involves different business sectors to make that holistic experience work. But if you only rely on payment itself, it’s very difficult to achieve that. But when we have the smart data in place, then we can use the sharable data, standardized sharable data across different business sectors, so that we can create much more meaningful services to support, you know, the new wed couples for example, or many other use cases, many other customer experience areas. For example in health and in transport. If I give you another example, in the health sector, how smart data can render better value for the human beings. For example, if I say, my one day, my grandmother may feel very ill and I’m going to take her to the emergency center to receive treatment, and at this point in time it’s highly likely that when I take her to the health center, they may have the existing record of my grandmother’s, to understand her health history or what is the medicine she cannot take, etc. But when we have the smart data, then you can, if you can imagine, each of the health centers or the medical centers, they all have the medical history of my grandmother, and they all know what medicine is effective to her, what blood type she has. So this data, having it in place, will really save so much time and also the money for the health industry as well, to give effective, in-time treatment for my grandmother. And furthermore, if for example we have the wearable, like product, like a smartwatch for example, that can monitor my grandma’s health throughout the months and years, so that we can provide, rather than reactive treatment, but preventative treatment, through the usage of smart data, that will massively lift the health service to patients like my grandmother. So I think there’s millions of those use cases that we can pursue, and once we have the capabilities in place, I would firmly believe that transformative experiences will be given onto us as human beings, and also it will benefit our society as a whole.

Yeah, it’s so important. So I’ve been talking, you know, I’m an API Evangelist, I’ve been evangelizing APIs for almost 15 years now, you and I have been talking for a decade, we do a lot of talk about APIs and data and these technical things. Do you think that this is the future for us technologists, that we maybe need to talk a little less about APIs and the raw data and a little bit more about these human impacts of what’s going on? You think this is how we’re going to get the results that we want?

Yeah, another great question. I think we should talk about both of them, because I think, yeah, our today’s age and technology-driven innovation has become very prominent, and that’s because we are using technology or APIs as a catalyst to create new changes. And now we have the technology in place, then we have to work with the businesses and with the regulators and with the government to make sure that we create the environment for technology really to deliver the value it should deliver to us. And so I felt we should pursue the progress in all these areas, including technology, business, regulation, and just creating the environment, the ecosystem, for everyone to contribute.

Great. One last question for you. Why do you do this work?

Yeah, I think I love the fact that API actually connects us so closely to meaningful connections with the world. I think that’s probably why I intuitively, from years ago, I felt this connection of turning data into useful information in the organization, and that was where I started to do, and that was so beneficial for the customer, using internally and externally. And then now, once we have the useful information, we use API to turn the information into knowledge, into executable actions, insights, so that we can use the information, join them across business sectors, even to create more meaningful experiences. And to me, I felt it’s very profound, and that’s what I love to do. And actually my aspiration is that I could help with the smart data industry to join the dots and create almost like a tube map or London Underground map, like mapping system, so that with the power of APIs we can, together with the ecosystem, create value, and I think that’s what my value is.

Yeah, I love it, you’re obviously speaking my language, there’s the London, yes, I was big fan of that kind of visualization for seeing a system, a complex system. And so, well, I have to say, you know, APIs have connected you and I, like this type of feedback loops with really smart people doing interesting things is why I do this. So I’m very thankful that APIs have connected us and brought us together to have these conversations, and I appreciate you coming by today. We’re going to have Heather back on to talk about other things, we’re going to dive into some of those specific life situations and use cases, I think we’re going to talk some more about the kind of international aspect of this. Hopefully this is just the first of many conversations. Heather, thank you for coming by.

Thank you, Kin, I appreciate it.

All right, very cool. Always love talking to Heather, as you can tell, wealth of experience, very pragmatic, having worked in the financial space and connecting the dots on these standards, I think is super critical. But really where her focus is, and why she’s going to be back on the show many times over, is her focus on that human side, the business side. She’s got a really pragmatic and realistic view about how to keep banks interested in this, government interested, but also really focusing on the end users. So appreciate her coming by, thanks so much, and we’ll see you all later.