KONG API Gateway and Open Banking in 2025: Global Momentum and Southeast Asia's Emerging Adoption
- Sarah Huang
- Jun 18
- 4 min read
Open banking in 2025 is no longer a theoretical framework—it is an operational priority and a competitive differentiator for financial institutions globally. From the UK’s mature PSD2 ecosystem to Latin America’s inclusive banking revolution and Southeast Asia’s fragmented but accelerating landscape, banks and fintechs alike are aligning their digital infrastructure with emerging open finance mandates. One of the notable technologies gaining traction across this transition is KONG API Gateway.
Globally known for its lightweight, open-source, and developer-first architecture, KONG is increasingly recognized as a core enabler of secure, scalable API strategies in open banking environments. While historically popular among agile startups and tech-forward enterprises, in recent years, its enterprise product has matured significantly, leading to adoption by major financial institutions looking to balance innovation with governance.
A Global Push: KONG’s Rise in Financial Services
KONG’s initial appeal stemmed from its open-source roots, modern architecture, and cloud-native deployment model. As regulatory mandates around API exposure (such as FDX in the US, Brazil's Open Finance, and Australia's CDR) tightened, KONG began to appear in RFPs and reference architectures for tier-1 and tier-2 banks.
For example:
In Brazil, several fintechs building on top of Banco Central’s Open Finance guidelines have used KONG to manage partner onboarding and secure traffic routing.
In the UK, challenger banks and e-money institutions use KONG for rate-limited, versioned APIs that expose account data and payment initiation flows.
In Australia, CDR-compliant data holders are layering KONG with consent orchestration services to meet ACCC guidelines around granular user permissions and real-time auditing.
What makes KONG unique is its modularity—it doesn’t require a rip-and-replace approach. It can be deployed as a sidecar gateway, a centralized proxy, or integrated into service meshes, making it appealing to financial institutions at different stages of digital maturity.
Southeast Asia: A Region Ripe for Agile API Infrastructure
In Southeast Asia, where open banking is emerging unevenly across jurisdictions, KONG’s flexibility makes it an attractive proposition. While no single country has yet mandated a PSD2-style regime, regulators in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam are actively shaping API standards and consent-based frameworks.
Banks and fintechs are under pressure to:
Expose standard APIs for payments, account information, and verification.
Secure those APIs with OAuth 2.0, mTLS, and consent tracking.
Monitor and scale access across third parties and internal applications.
In Thailand, KBank and SCB have been modernizing their backend architecture, and while KONG has not been publicly cited as their gateway solution, the architectural patterns emerging from their open API documentation suggest compatibility with gateway technologies like KONG.
In Indonesia, early-stage TPPs (Third Party Providers) working under BI-SNAP guidance are reportedly using open-source gateway technologies, including KONG, to simulate compliant API interactions. Local system integrators are also bundling KONG into deployment templates for banks preparing to expose open banking sandboxes.
Use Case Fit: Why KONG Matters for Open Banking
KONG’s plugin-based architecture allows banks and regulated fintechs to:
Enforce OAuth 2.0 flows, including PKCE and JWT validation.
Implement rate limits, IP restrictions, and custom header validation.
Log API access for regulatory audits via integrations with ELK, Prometheus, or third-party SIEM tools.
Publish OpenAPI specs to secure, role-based developer portals.
This is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, where compliance obligations vary but the need for secure, observable API traffic is universal. For example, in the Philippines, the BSP’s digital banking licenses encourage robust developer environments for partner integrations—something KONG’s Dev Portal and API control layers are well suited for.
Market Signals: Who’s Adopting, and Who’s Exploring
While adoption is often confidential, industry insights point to the following trends:
Mid-tier banks in Vietnam and the Philippines are testing KONG in pilot environments due to its ease of deployment and container compatibility.
Fintech aggregators operating in cross-border lending and payments are deploying KONG for API abstraction layers.
System integrators across Malaysia and Singapore are packaging KONG in their open banking migration kits, especially for banks hesitant to commit to heavier enterprise stacks.
While KONG may not be the first choice for large legacy players locked into IBM or Axway ecosystems, it is emerging as the preferred option for greenfield digital banks, fintech consortiums, and open API initiatives backed by regional startup ecosystems.
Final Thoughts: KONG in the 2025 Landscape
In 2025, open banking infrastructure is not just about compliance—it’s about capability. KONG’s rise in financial services reflects the market’s need for platforms that are lightweight, modular, and developer-first—but still capable of scaling under regulatory scrutiny.
In Southeast Asia, as regulators issue clearer API specifications and banks move from internal APIs to external exposure, tools like KONG are likely to feature more prominently. Their value isn’t just in what they do—but in how quickly they enable product teams to move.
For product owners, CTOs, and digital transformation leaders in Southeast Asia, the decision isn’t whether to adopt open banking—it’s how to build for it. KONG may not be the flashiest solution on the market, but it is fast becoming one of the most practical.
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