Banking group Emirates NBD has announced a fintech partnership with non-profit financial innovation platform APIX Singapore.

The bank, which operates in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, said the fintech collaboration will give Emirates NBD access to the APIX network of financial institutions and more than 1,000 fintechs, including their real-time APIs.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow apps to talk to each other, share data and carry out a specific function or process.

APIX is the world’s first cross-border, open architecture API marketplace and sandbox platform for collaboration between fintechs and financial institutions. An initiative of the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN), APIX helps market players connect and collaborate on design experiments, and then test solutions with each other via cloud-based architecture.

The partnership with APIX gives Emirates NBD access to early and later stage fintechs in Singapore, enabling discussions covering new business models, regulation, and public-private collaborations. Through the APIX catalogue of member APIs, templates and API tools, the bank plans to develop new digital processes and services.

“As the first bank in the Middle East to team up with APIX, we are excited to discover and collaborate with international fintech players in Singapore to bring new opportunities and drive fintech innovation in the region,” Miguel Rio Tinto, Emirates NBD’s group chief information officer, said in a statement.

“We see this as a chance to stay ahead of the curve and bring our customers best-in-class experiences through new innovative digital products and services.”

Sopnendu Mohanty, chief fintech officer of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) welcomed Emirates NBD’s membership of APIX.

“We are confident that with this partnership, our organizations will succeed in our endeavours in building a stronger ecosystem while reducing technological risk and cost by leveraging APIX’s global fintech community and readily available cloud infrastructure,” Mohanty said.