The battle between winning and losing in the present financial market is only a matter of milliseconds but it places immense pressure on the engineering teams. Nevertheless, for Kishore Hebbar—a senior software engineer with a vast experience of over 16 years in the industry—the development of APIs that meet the requirements of speed, security, and compliance is more about trust and less about technology.
Working under the regulators’ watchful eyes, the financial institutions face quite a challenge for they have to transact in such a manner that their operations don’t raise suspicion, and at the same time their compliance teams are processing thousands of transactions per day. As a result, compliance has now become a routine rather than an occasional thing. Hebbar is among the rarest of engineers who opine that compliance should be integrated into the API family right from the start—that very spot where data is checked, opened up, and handled.
Building APIs for a Regulated World
Modern APIs are essential to digital banking, trading platforms, and insurance procedures as well as e-commerce systems. However, in the case of regulated industries, these APIs could not be merely functional. The APIs would need to carry out the following actions: log who accessed the data, track the source of the transactions, apply the data privacy policies, and comply with the rapidly changing laws such as GDPR, PCI-DSS, and SOX.
Hebbar emphasizes that APIs are not only transferring data—they are also transferring confidence. “In regulated sectors, your IT structure must be capable of being scrutinized. Anytime the auditors are in doubt, your systems should already be providing the answers.”
Fixing the Compliance Bottleneck in Legacy Systems
Before heading to Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Hebbar was in charge of IBM’s wide-scale modernization projects and thus helped Fortune 500 companies gradually change from inflexible monoliths to pretty much microservices that were secure and compliant.
Making the old REST APIs compliant was one of his main challenges. A lot of legacy systems had neither the necessary security measures in place to stop sensitive data from being leaked nor had they implemented the proper headers that would allow monitoring of the messages flowing back and forth and so on.
The approach that he proposed involved schema-first API design using reactive Spring WebFlux together with data exposure rules that were predictable, role-based access control, and complete request tracing from the edge to the database.
Zero Trust + Full Observability: A Modern Compliance Blueprint
With the compliance area becoming wider in DevSecOps, data engineering, and legal teams, Hebbar along with his team is advocating design patterns that are powered by Zero Trust and total observability. In the case of IBM, he initiated the following actions:
- Identity flows based on OAuth2/OpenID Connect
- Tokenization of personal data at the API boundary
- Creation of detailed RBAC at the route level
- Storage of logs with user and transaction metadata
- Application of compliance tagging on Kafka topics
- Real-time tracing via Open Telemetry
SLA monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana
The engineering departments managed to pass the audits without raising any questions, detect the fraud earlier, and reduce the operational costs; nevertheless, they did not stop the delivery. One senior enterprise architect referred to Hebbar’s frameworks as “audit-compliant yet product roadmap-accelerating systems.”
Automating Compliance for Faster Innovation
Financial platforms usually face the dilemma of having fast innovation or lengthy compliance checks. Nevertheless, the dilemma has been made lighter for Hebbar through the development of reusable templates along with a compliance-aware API framework.
The internal tool that he was responsible for and revealed in 2024 was the one that performed the following functions:
- Automatically inserted compliance headers (X-User-Id, X-Tenant-Trace)
- Carried out schema validation against the contracts with third parties
- Implemented complete request-response audit logging
The result was:
- Manual compliance reviews reduced by 40%
- Development team gotten on board faster
- Critical services’ SLA commitments improved by 25%
Real-Time Financial Data: Designed for Precision
In areas of great importance like mortgage underwriting and fraud detection, the event-based microservices designed by Hebbar guarantee that every decision along with its respective timestamp are logged, easily tracked, and even replayed. The adoption of unalterable Kafka event logs permits the regulatory teams, auditors, and data scientists to go through the entire transaction flows again— this is vital for the interpretability in SHAP/XAI models.
Creating a Compliance-Aware Engineering Culture
Technological innovation alone won’t get the job done. Hebbar has held in-house seminars at IBM and ICE on:
- Compliance-first API architecture
- Logging for regulators (more than just debugging)
- Data lineage as a common service
His focus on culture has enabled to reduce the risk in engineering and make the secure-by-design mindset prevalent among different teams.
Why This Matters
The next ten years of fintech will be marked by secure scaling, as international regulations become tighter and consumer demands slowly start to change.
“Only the platforms which keep trust in the process of their growth will become the champions,” Hebbar asserts.
Kishore Hebbar, by his architectural frameworks and cultural leadership, is eventually paving the way for APIs not just being regarded as technical endpoints but also being the major player in the long run for compliance, security and trust maintenance.
About Kishore Hebbar
At present, Kishore Hebbar is working with ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) as a Senior Software Engineer. He has more than 16 years of experience in the said field throughout various companies such as IBM, Cognizant, Hexaware, and ICE. Apart from other things, he has been responsible for changing API platforms, creating ML pipelines for fraud detection, and migrating the entire mainframe to Java within large proportions.
