# APIs – A Catalyst for Growth
source: https://developer.mastercard.com/blog/apis-a-catalyst-for-growth/index.md

Authors: Lisa Bongiovi. It is no secret that the race to Digital transformation is well under way, and those waiting to catch on will need to move faster than ever to survive. Our current market demands businesses to expand their reach and rapidly adapt to the evolving needs of their customers. This is no small order, but the industries that have been able to do so all have one thing in common; they understand that APIs are the facilitating force to achieve digital transformation. It is that same understanding that continues to drive Mastercard's API First approach for all new product development. When I started on the Mastercard Developers team almost 5 years ago, this certainly wasn't the case -- in fact it was difficult to find someone outside of a technical role to properly explain what an API was. Fast forward to today, and nearly every business partner would agree that APIs are key to doing business in this digitally transformed world. APIs are creating economies of scale for companies who focused their resources on modernizing infrastructure. In doing so, these companies are not only able to easily integrate 3rd party APIs, but they're now more likely to distribute and monetize their own. The continued evolution and ubiquity of APIs pushed us to provide a robust developer platform, offering a variety of value-added services across Payments, Security, Loyalty and Data verticals. In the past few years, we have also added governance around how we build our APIs. We started scoring each of them against standardized technical and performance criteria, to ensure all of our services are published to the highest standard. In the blog post API Tough Love, our Executive Vice President, Oran Cummins, details the criteria we use to complete these assessments. It's called API Tough Love because we were forced to take a hard look at ourselves, in addition to what the market demanded, and quickly adapt. Now that our quality control is in order, we've been able to add even more focus to improving the overall developer experience. We're looking deeper into usage patterns of our platform, the efficacy of our designs, and the clarity of our documentation. We want to see what is possible when we remove friction and simply let developers do what they do best -- create. In summary, the impetus for change can be something as simple as quality, or as daunting as maintaining relevancy, but once that challenge has been met, there is always room for growth on the other side. Our API First approach is not just a strategy to remain competitive, but a way for Mastercard to facilitate the growth and ideas of our customers; to give them the tools to build solutions we may never have imagined.