API integration services for trading platforms

Modern trading and investment platforms rely on dozens of external services: exchanges, brokers, data vendors, KYC providers, payment gateways and more. Solid API integration is what connects all of these pieces into one coherent system. Poorly designed integrations lead to outages, race conditions and hidden bugs; well-designed connectors become invisible and simply work.

1. Typical APIs we integrate

• Crypto exchange APIs for trading, balances and market data.
• FX and CFD broker APIs, including FIX and REST endpoints.
• Payment gateways for card processing, bank transfers and wallets.
• KYC/AML and identity verification services.
• Market data and news feeds for real-time and historical data.

2. Integration patterns: REST and WebSocket

Most financial APIs combine REST for configuration and account operations with WebSockets or streaming protocols for live data. Our integration patterns reflect this split.

2.1 REST clients

• Typed request/response models with validation.
• Automatic retries and exponential backoff on transient errors.
• Centralised logging of requests, responses and error codes.
• Rate-limit handling that prevents bans and throttling.

2.2 Streaming clients

• WebSocket clients with reconnection and back-pressure handling.
• Subscription management for multiple symbols and channels.
• Heartbeat and ping/pong monitoring for stale connections.
• Graceful fallbacks to polling when streams are unavailable.

3. Security and authentication

Trading platforms process sensitive financial data and control real money. API integration must therefore respect security best practices from the start rather than as an afterthought.

• Encrypted storage of API keys and credentials.
• Support for HMAC signatures, OAuth flows and mutual TLS.
• Per-service roles and scopes for least-privilege access.
• Audit trails for all changes to API credentials and configuration.

4. Unified abstraction layer

When your platform talks to many exchanges or gateways, each API behaves a little differently. To avoid spreading those differences everywhere in your codebase, we design a unified abstraction layer that exposes:

• Common interfaces for placing orders, querying balances and fetching data.
• Normalised error types and exceptions.
• Configuration-driven routing to specific providers.
• Pluggable adapters so new integrations can be added cleanly.

5. Monitoring, logging and alerts

No integration is complete without observability. When something goes wrong, you must know what happened and where.

• Metrics for latency, error rates and throughput per endpoint.
• Dashboards that highlight slow or failing providers.
• Alert rules for timeouts, high error ratios and authentication failures.
• Structured logs that can be searched during incident investigations.

With a solid integration layer, your trading platform can grow, connect to new partners and evolve without becoming a fragile cluster of one-off scripts.