How Coface Delivered a Modern API Portal and Dramatically Accelerated Customer Onboarding
Learn how Coface uses WireMock Cloud to create isolated testing environments for its financial APIs, accelerating customer onboarding and testing.
"WireMock enables smoother, more automated integration with less manual work - making the process quicker for us and our customers."
Client
Coface is a global credit insurer providing financial security through trade credit insurance, debt collection services, business information, and bonds for over 60 years.
Challenge
Replace production-based testing with dedicated sandbox environments to eliminate risks and operational inefficiencies in API customer onboarding.
Solution
Implemented WireMock Cloud to create sophisticated API sandboxes that simulate complex business logic and stateful scenarios, enabling safe and realistic testing environments for external customers.
Results
Reduced customer onboarding time from 2-3 months to days-weeks while removing manual overhead for sales engineers and improving API quality through early issue detection.
Coface (Compagnie Française d'Assurance pour le Commerce Extérieur) is a credit insurer that operates globally. In simple terms, if a business sells products or services to a customer who fails to pay within the agreed timeframe, Coface's insurance covers this loss, providing financial security that enables businesses to trade confidently in both domestic and international markets. Coface also offers debt collection services, factoring and business information, and bonds.
To deliver these services effectively and integrate them into client workflows, Coface has built an API ecosystem serving developers, corporate customers, brokers, and financial partners.
Eliminating Security Risks and Inefficiencies in API Customer Onboarding
Coface's API portfolio has grown substantially over time to include credit and insurance APIs, business information APIs, broker APIs, and recently-introduced debt collection APIs. Each of Coface’s customers has access to a different set of APIs, and needs access to a sandbox-type environment where they could test and onboard.
Before partnering with WireMock, Coface did not have a straightforward way to create a dedicated testing environment for external customers. Instead, customers had to test using limited test contracts running against production APIs.
This approach created several significant challenges:
Limited testing environments: Creating a full staging environment that reflected the full capabilities of Coface’s API suite was not feasible, which led to only partial being exposed to customers.
Operational inefficiencies: Sales engineers had to manually create test contracts, manage account setups, and often even coordinate with underwriters and legal/financial departments to create test data.
Lack of isolation: Testing against production data could create potential compliance and performance risk - and mitigating said risks required careful oversight of each testing environment.
Long time to onboard new customers: The cumulative effect of these challenges was a lengthy onboarding process – for some customers, this could be several months.
“Before using WireMock, creating a staging API meant replicating the logic of 20+ applications that feed into that API, and it was very difficult to understand why things weren’t working as expected.”
"We needed a more advanced API simulation platform because of the business logic behind our APIs. It's not like you always send the same request and receive the same response. We needed something that uses data sources, state, all the capabilities that are available on WireMock Cloud."
Decoupling Sandboxes From Production APIs Using WireMock Cloud’s Advanced API Simulation
Coface chose WireMock Cloud after evaluating several API simulation solutions. They needed advanced capabilities to simulate complex business logic and stateful mocking that could accurately reproduce their sophisticated API ecosystem.
How WireMock Cloud was implemented
WireMock Cloud is now used to power API sandboxes for new and existing customer sandboxes:
Mirroring existing APIs: For their established API offering, business analysts worked with mock API designer to incorporate real-world scenarios based on sales engineers' experiences and held regular demos to gather feedback. This created a reliable sandbox that accurately reflected production behavior without the associated risks.
Mock-first approach for new APIs: For their new Debt Collection API, Coface took a more "mock-first" approach, where the mock designer collaborated directly with the business team from the earliest development stages. This allowed them to create functional mocks, documentation, and ready-to-use Postman collections simultaneously.
Public developer portal. An important part of Coface's solution is their public API portal. This portal gives customers access to detailed functional documentation about test cases and scenarios in the sandbox environments. Clients can use Postman collections which are already configured to work with the WireMock-powered sandboxes.
Accelerated API Integration and Better Customer Experience
Using WireMock Cloud, Coface and their customers have access to isolated testing environments that significantly accelerate customer onboarding, allow customers to run more realistic tests, and eliminate the need to test against production APIs.
Key results include:
Dramatically faster customer onboarding: customer integration timelines reduced from 2-3 months to just weeks or even days, accelerating time-to-value while reducing frustration during onboarding.
Automation: Sales engineers and business teams no longer need to work manually in order to generate a testing sandbox when a new customer comes onboard, as these can be simply defined via WireMock Cloud.
Better API quality: The sandbox environment helped Coface spot API issues before customers encountered them. As Ali noted, "when we tested the mock, we were able to find some issues on the API before they could impact customers.” The mocks also enable closer collaboration with Coface’s customers to deliver sandboxes that could better suit their testing needs.
"WireMock enables smoother, more automated integration with less manual work - making the process quicker for us and our customers."
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