Green Sheet interviews Sensedia's Filipe Torqueto

APIs have long been the connective tissue of modern payments, powering everything from merchant onboarding to fraud prevention. But as the industry matures, many providers are shifting their focus from APIs as back-end plumbing to APIs as full-fledged products and revenue drivers. To explore this evolution, The Green Sheet connected with Filipe Torqueto, head of U.S. solutions at Sensedia.

In this candid Q&A, Torqueto discusses where untapped opportunities lie, how to balance agility with compliance, and why developer experience and cultural change are as critical to monetization as the technology itself.

1. Many ISOs and processors already rely on APIs for merchant onboarding, settlement and fraud prevention. Where do you see the greatest untapped opportunities for payments companies to directly monetize their APIs.

APIs have already monetized core functions like onboarding, payments and fraud checks. But that's mostly a new channel for existing capabilities. The next wave of monetization won't come from more endpoints; it will come from charging for outcomes and for the data exhaust those endpoints generate.

First, fix the basics. If the developer experience is weak (docs, SDKs, sandbox parity, versioning, SLAs), any monetization plan will stall. Pricing must evolve with adoption (clear tiers, usage-based where it matters) and avoid predatory gates that choke network effects.

Once the foundation is solid, move beyond functional APIs to productized data and premium flows:

• Merchant intelligence APIs: Package anonymized/aggregated transaction signals (cohort benchmarks, LTV proxies, chargeback propensity, working-capital risk) for banks, lenders and insurers. Price per seat/lookup or via data subscriptions.

• Transactional Upsells: Instant settlement/liquidity as an API with premium fees or basis-point markups; cross-border optimization that dynamically routes to minimize FX/interchange, monetize via shared-savings.

• Ecosystem monetization: An API marketplace (loyalty, BNPL) with revenue share; event/webhook streams sold with premium SLAs.

• Vertical plays: Higher-margin, domain-specific APIs (for example, healthcare revenue cycle, gig payouts, real-estate rent rails) where workflow depth justifies premium pricing.

Design for consent/permissioning, anonymization by default, transparent data provenance, and pricing tied to measurable value (time-to-cash, basis points saved, fraud avoided). A useful test: if turning off an API breaks a customer's workflow within 24 hours, you can charge for it; if not, it's still plumbing.

2. Payment APIs are subject to PCI, AML and evolving regulatory frameworks. How can providers balance strict compliance requirements with the agility needed to design APIs that generate new revenue streams?

Balancing agility with compliance starts with the mindset of "treat compliance as a design constraint, not a bolt-on." In payments, regulation is inevitable, PCI, AML, sanctions lists, so building with a "compliance by design" approach pays off. That means embedding data minimization, consent management APIs and standardized audit logs directly into the API layer. If these are designed from the start, they stop being bottlenecks and actually accelerate time to market.

A second lever is data separation. Isolate regulated data (like PII) from non-sensitive flows through clear boundaries. This reduces the PCI scope of most APIs, enabling product teams to innovate faster without dragging compliance overhead into every service. Strong API management and governance guardrails, versioning, schema enforcement, security policies keep this discipline consistent across teams.

The opportunity isn't only defensive. Compliance itself can become a revenue generator. Instead of treating AML/KYC as a cost center, expose them as reusable APIs: pay-per-verification, real-time sanctions checks, onboarding orchestration. Merchants and partners will pay to consume these compliance-as-a-service capabilities if they save time and reduce their own risk.

Providers can also fuel agility with sandbox environments powered by synthetic data. These let developers and partners build and test new use cases safely, without triggering regulatory risks.

Finally, look at what open banking has proven: regulatory APIs can be safe, standardized and still unlock entirely new ecosystems. Heavily regulated rails don't kill innovation; they often catalyze it. When providers design APIs that both meet compliance and enable new use cases, they build trust, and trust is the foundation for monetization.

3. With Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and countless fintechs exposing APIs, how can established and new payment providers stand out? What lessons have you seen from payments firms that turned APIs into successful products rather than just back-end plumbing?

To stand out against the giants, providers need to focus on three key items:

1. World-class developer experience: The big networks have scale, but their developer experience often feels enterprise-heavy and slow. Smaller or newer providers can win with consumer-grade DX: instant signup, transparent pricing, sandboxes with synthetic data, and copy-paste SDKs. When APIs are a joy to integrate, developers not only adopt them faster but also advocate for them inside their organizations.

2. Vertical specialization: Rather than competing head-on, go deep where the big players are generic. APIs tailored for healthcare billing, cross-border remittances or real-estate rent flows solve pain points that generic rails overlook. Specialization accelerates adoption and positions you as the go-to provider in that niche.

3. Flexibility and responsiveness: Large players rarely adapt quickly to individual customer needs. A smaller API initiative can differentiate by being flexible: tailoring workflows, adjusting settlement options or embedding compliance logic to match a customer's pain point. This flexibility not only closes deals it embeds you into the customer's business long term.

Lessons learned: The most successful API strategies treat APIs as products, not plumbing. Frictionless developer experience becomes a growth engine. Turning raw connectivity into enriched, usable data creates stickiness. And offering unified, simplified flows across complex geographies or use cases becomes a premium that customers will pay for.

4. For organizations transitioning from APIs as connectors to APIs as products, what cultural and operational changes need to happen inside the business to make monetization viable?

Since I like analogies and lists, I will use the three key areas to move from APIs as connectors" to "APIs as products:

1. Cultural: The biggest change is in mindset. APIs can't be treated as purely technical assets sitting with IT. They need to be managed as products, with roadmaps, pricing, customer feedback loops and SLAs. That means having product owners for APIs, not just architects.
 APIs are also living products: never done, always refined based on adoption, usage data and customer needs. Finally, culture must shift from an internal focus to external empathy: thinking of the developer as the customer. Documentation, onboarding flows, DX and support become as important as uptime.

2. Operational: Execution requires dedicated teams focused on the API business. Developers consuming APIs must be treated like customers, with streamlined experiences and responsive support. As usage grows, a solid management and governance layer is essential, a reliable platform that scales, enforces security and compliance, and provides observability. Success is measured not just by uptime, but through business metrics like adoption, churn and revenue per API.

3. Organizational alignment: An API strategy can't live in a silo. It must extend across marketing, compliance, product, sales and engineering. Sales needs enablement to position APIs as solutions and outcomes, not just features. Compliance must be embedded into the lifecycle. And most critically, executive sponsorship is non-negotiable; leadership must recognize APIs as a business model, not a side project, to secure the investment and cross-functional alignment required.

5. How should companies measure the ROI of their API monetization strategies? Are there benchmarks or metrics, beyond direct revenue, that leaders should track to gauge success?

Let's push beyond just revenue. Saying only "API revenue" is shallow. Leaders want to understand the broader business impact, and that requires a more structured set of metrics (yes, another list)  

 
1. Direct metrics

   API revenue matters (I said it is shallow but necessary), if monetization is the explicit goal, you must measure the dollars tied directly to usage. But it can't stop there. You should also track:

   Cost savings: reduced time spent on customer onboarding, fewer resources burned on one-off integrations, and lower support overhead.

   Time-to-revenue: how quickly a customer begins generating value once they adopt your APIs. Faster conversion from onboarding to transaction is a critical signal.


2. Adoption and engagement metrics

   Direct revenue tells you what happened; adoption tells you what's coming. Metrics to track include:

   Active developers/active apps: More developers building means deeper ecosystem engagement and stronger long-term growth.

   API call volume and growth: Usage trends reveal stickiness, seasonality and potential risks.

   Partner onboarding speed: one of the most overlooked KPIs. The faster a partner integrates, the faster value flows. Tracking and continuously shortening this cycle creates compounding benefits.

3. Customer value and retention metrics
 APIs that drive retention are just as valuable as those that drive revenue. Some key metrics under it are:

   Churn reduction: partners that integrate APIs are "stickier." Track retention rates of integrated vs. non-integrated customers, and combine with YoY API usage trends to flag churn risks early.

   NPS/developer satisfaction: APIs are products, and satisfaction matters. Running structured feedback programs and tracking NPS over time ensures you know how developers feel about your APIs and where to improve.

   Cross-sell/upsell conversion: APIs often unlock adoption of premium features, like instant settlement, risk scoring, or enriched data. Measure how API adoption correlates with the uptake of higher-value services.
 API ROI is multi-dimensional. Revenue is the obvious KPI, but adoption, customer stickiness, and upsell potential are the real leading indicators of long-term monetization success. These three layers of metrics, direct, adoption, and retention. Provide a clear picture of the overall health of any API strategy.

6. Looking ahead three to five years, what new forms of partnership, customer engagement or digital channels do you think will emerge from API-first strategies, and how might this disrupt the payments industry?

Exercising a bit of futurology, we can already see the direction of travel. Personalized experiences are emerging today, but with AI layered on top of API-first strategies, the next few years will bring fundamental shifts.

Right now, we have fragmented ecosystems, open banking, Baa and industry-specific silos. AI will act as the connective tissue, combining these ecosystems into something far more personalized, contextual and dynamic. APIs will no longer just be channels; they'll become the rule for how value is exchanged, orchestrated by AI in real time.

We also can't ignore non-human API consumption. APIs are already a channel, but AI agents will increasingly be the consumers, not just developers or applications. This will transform how APIs are designed and exposed. New protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol) are early signals of how APIs will evolve to support agentic behaviors, making API strategy even more critical.

As I often say, every problem is an integration problem, and with AI, we're facing integration challenges on steroids. AI is already disrupting, but the next barrier of innovation is in how AI consumes, orchestrates and enriches APIs. This will push issues like API governance, observability, and security, already hard today, to an entirely new level of importance.

In the future, APIs will remain the rails, but AI will become the intelligence layer riding on top, redefining how ecosystems connect, how experiences are delivered and how payment providers create value.

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