The following article was posted by Payments Journal.

New entrants and new technology continue to flood the payments industry, and every day we see that the boundaries of the industry are expanded. With this evolution of tech and the rise of fintechs in particular, we realized that we had an opportunity to help transform the creativity of these big thinkers in the payments community into marketable commercial products. We’ve offered our APIs to contracted clients for years.

Five years ago, 40 to 50 percent of our clients were coding to our APIs. By the end of 2016, that percentage was over 90. As part of our commitment to helping the payments industry innovate and grow, Galileo recently opened our suite of APIs and our sandbox, enabling developers to experiment and test their creativity in a secure environment. Without signing an NDA, virtually anyone can immediately begin to code to the APIs.

Developers can unleash their creativity in the sandbox while business arrangements are finalized—helping to minimize launch time. Galileo’s open environment enables developers to create, experiment and test drive features and functionality before making a buying decision.

Our APIs support fintech developers in creating innovative products and adding alert and authorization features that differentiate their creations—providing a more engaging user experience, embedding added security and expanding the universe of use cases. The developer-centric design instantly creates code fragments, in popular programming languages, with a single click in for any API method or function, cutting development time.

The sandbox simulates Galileo’s live operating environment, so developers—whether working at a startup, tech company or large bank—can code to the APIs and test their concepts at will. By giving businesses the option to innovate without limitations, Galileo hopes to enable and promote tremendous creativity in payments and financial services.

By Clay Wilkes, founder and CEO of Galileo Processing, an innovative payments processor and program manager for prepaid, debit and virtual transactions.