Digitizing Pakistan through APIs – Telenor’s Pivotal Role at its headquarter ‘345’

Telenor Pakistan hosted a first-of-its-kind thought leadership forum on the role of APIs in developing the digital ecosystem in Pakistan – themed ‘Digitizing Pakistan through APIs’. The event was attended by industry experts, government officials, small and large businesses, startups, digital distribution, and retail partners along with top management of Telenor Pakistan. The summit showcased the importance of APIs in instituting an open innovation paradigm, which is the key for enabling digitization and transformation; and Telenor Pakistan`s role as torchbearers of digital transformation in the country.

The forum discussed how Telenor is digitally transforming various industry sectors through its services and highlighted its API Portal which can help these organizations better engage their users. According to Khurrum Ashfaque, Chief Technology Officer – Telenor Pakistan & Cluster CTO Emerging Asia, the main objective behind this portal is to build an open API ecosystem through collaboration and pave way for the massive API economy the world is gearing up for. While speaking on the forum, Khurram highlighted:

“Telenor Pakistan is at the forefront in enabling the digital ecosystem in the country and events like these give us the opportunity to exchange learning with different industries and sectors.”

Promoting an open-source ecosystem at the national level

The talks at the forum were moderated by Khawaja Obaidullah, Head of Partnerships & BizDev at Telenor Pakistan and the panelists included high profile figures from Wavetec, APImatic, and Code for Pakistan. The panelists underscored that APIs can play an extremely important role in the promotion of innovation in the country and using Telenor APIs, organizations can digitally transform the way they provide their services.

Built for developers, by developers

The Telenor API Portal has been developed keeping in mind the needs of developers and offering them solutions which can help integrate direct carrier billing as well as get to know their customer better through “Device Information” and more.

As of now, developers can utilize the following APIs from the Telenor API Portal:

1. SMS – Send notifications and offers through text messaging.
2. Balance Inquiry -Inquire customer balance to pitch personalized offerings.
3. Subscriber Info – Get information regarding the customer.
4. Device Information – Get information regarding handset your customer is using.
5. Monetization-App & In-App purchases on Play Store using the customer’s mobile balance; an alternate to Credit cards.
6. OAuth – Time bound access to call allowed APIs.

APIs not only ease the work of a developer but also help them offload many services to external servers allowing them to optimize their applications in regard to resource usage.

Telenor started its focus on APIs back in 2017 through its API Gateway Project and since then they have collaborated with many firms to develop a sustainable and feature-rich API ecosystem catering to the needs of developers and users at large.

The article is produced in collaboration with Telenor.