MTN on Tuesday unveiled its new pan-African API marketplace to enable developers and businesses to discover and subscribe to what will become the largest library of open APIs published on the continent.
The API marketplace is known as Chenosis, a name Chenosis derived from the ancient Greek word ‘Henosis’ which means ‘oneness’, ‘union’ or ‘unity’. It is a cross-industry API marketplace that enables developers, entrepreneurs and businesses to come together to create, discover and integrate into the fastest growing library of open APIs.
“Chenosis is a separate brand and entity, and will have an arms-length relationship with MTN so that it remains open to all mobile network operators, fintech start-ups, payment service providers, mobile wallet operators, financial service providers, and more,” says Charles Molapisi, MTN Group Chief Technology and Information Officer.
The Chenosis Marketplace will be open to the public from 10th August 2020.
It will enable developers to tap into a broad spectrum of API products and services from across the continent, ranging from telecommunications, e-health, e-government, IoT, FinTech, e-commerce, identity and authentication, payments and collections, location and more, from a single marketplace.
The marketplace also provides tools for publishers to monetise and promote their APIs by creating subscription plans and product bundles that developers and businesses can purchase. The portal has dashboards for publishers and consumers to track revenue and credit balances, view consumption analytics and API performance and lots more.
The power of the platform will be in the creation of mashup APIs which will connect cross-industry APIs and facilitate innovation and the ability to build new services and new business models. Mashups are new product and service orchestrations created by developers from two or more existing APIs.
“We have exciting pan-African and international partnerships lined up to publish and monetize their APIs in the marketplace over the coming months,” says Molapisi.
“These partnerships will enable Chenosis to become the largest and most diverse developer ecosystem on the African continent. This is one of the ways in which MTN is investing in the emergence of an open African API ecosystem that is powered by African ingenuity and innovation.”
