Kong API Summit '25 | Jonas Persson, SEB

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Jonas Persson

Enterprise Architect - SEB Group CIO

SEB

play_circle_outline Transforming API Lifecycle Management: Jonas's Journey as an Enterprise Architect at SEB

play_circle_outline Streamlining Product Development: SEB's Role in Simplifying API Management and Enhancing Security for Teams

play_circle_outline Navigating the Modernization Journey: Balancing Legacy Banking Systems with APIs for New Opportunities in a Tech-Driven Landscape

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Jonas Persson, SEB

Jonas Persson

Enterprise Architect - SEB Group CIO SEB

In this Kong API Summit ’25 interview, Jonas Persson, enterprise architect at SEB, joins theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty to unpack SEB’s multi-year API transformation and what it takes to scale from “meetings and manual steps” to fully automated pipelines. Persson explains how open banking pressures pushed SEB to adopt Kong, shifting from a centralized ESB model to a decentralized, product-oriented approach where teams own their integrations and “don’t even see the gateway.” He details the move to a developer portal, governance that fits banking realities a... Read more

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Jonas Persson, SEB

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Welcome back to Kong API Summit 2025. My name is Paul Nashawaty. I am the practice lead and principal analyst at the Cube Research, and I cover AppDev and all things related to application developers. And I'm coming to you live from the show floor at the event. Jonas, how you doing?

Jonas Persson

>> I'm fine.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great to have you here. Jonas from SEB.

Jonas Persson

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and a little bit about SB?

Jonas Persson

>> Yeah, yeah. I'm an enterprise architect at SCB. I'm driving the API transformation. I've been doing that for the last five, six years.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Super exciting stuff. That's why you're at the show.

Jonas Persson

>> Yeah. Yeah. So we've been an early customer to Kong. It started, I think it was about five, six years ago. I can maybe go through what it looked like before Kong. It was interesting, especially in the API area. Before Kong, if a team wanted to publish an API, they had to book a meeting with a guy, and go with that API actually, or send an email, and walked over. And he went through a manual process of like eight, nine steps. And then the API got published. And then six years ago, open banking happened. And of course that solution didn't scale that well, so we needed something different. So we around in the market and found Kong. And within a year, the whole API lifecycle process is fully automated. So the teams actually don't see the gateway. We don't meet that guy who published the API. They ask through the repository, hit a button, and the API gets published. So it was quite a journey we took within one year and how it changed the whole organization.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, Jonas, I just kind of envision like a suitcase handcuffed to somebody's wrist, and they walked into the room with this API.

Jonas Persson

>> Yeah, it was almost like that. I talked to this guy who did the publishing and he goes, "It was actually like a window of nine steps." And what is that third window? He's like, "I don't know. I was told to just do this." So it was really manual, and it was a centralized way of looking at integration and we wanted something more decentralized. The teams own their integration and then have full control of it.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Not really scalable .

Jonas Persson

>> Not at all. Not at all.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, I'll tell you, the keynote was super exciting. There was a lot happening there. A lot's going on. What are your thoughts from the keynote?

Jonas Persson

>> We are in that journey, especially in AI. I think we're getting, we're using AI for cost optimization and efficiency. But to take the next step to innovate on it, we need to set what we say, our house in order, our foundation, and that is reusable, good APIs. And that's the process we're in at the moment, trying to set that layer so we can innovate on top of that.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. When I heard you talking about SEB, and you were talking about the transitions that you made, obviously the heritage way of doing things is just not scalable, not going to work. But what are some of the things that your team did to shift, to move from your traditional API teams to the API platform teams? And can you talk a little bit about this?

Jonas Persson

>> Because it was a shift and it's sometimes, at least in our case, it's sometimes hard to change behavior.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure.

Jonas Persson

>> Because we being a Swedish bank, we've been, I think we're 100 years old. We're doing IT last 30, 40, 50 years. We have mainframe. And the teams, when they did integration in the past, they went to someone, a brokerage team, the ESB team, and then did integration. So the integration was never part of whatever I was building, if it was payment execution and so on. And we needed to change that whole process. And it was built in for the teams. They booked meetings, "I want to integrate with you, let's book a meeting." Oh, we're not going to book meetings. We should have a developer portal where you look at these APIs, where we'll try to reuse them. And that was a process, both an architectural and a developer process, but it's more organizational process to really set this ownership of products which have APIs, which customers consume. But it took maybe in different departments, some departments went straight on and some others we had to work a little bit harder on.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Did you have a skill gap changes and challenges?

Jonas Persson

>> Yeah. Yeah. And you have to be careful about it. So we had to take it in steps. But the good thing we had from the beginning, very good management support, management support who had the persistence to staying on it and through the whole journey.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I'm seeing in our research, we did some application development research and it's just field, it just came back in September. We're finding that 67% of organizations are hiring generalists over specialists. And the challenge is they're doing this because they just can't find the specialists. And so what they're realizing is, there's a friction, and there's challenges with complexity and skill gap issues. And these organizations like yourselves potentially push back on vendors like Kong. And instead say, "Make it frictionless. Make it easier to use." Has Kong been able to neutralize some of that?

Jonas Persson

>> For us, the teams should focus on building that capability, their product. And that product, now we have APIs representing SEB's core business, and they're divided into different products like payment execution, deposit accounts, loans, etc. And the teams should focus on building a product, having a strategy and roadmap for the product. They shouldn't worry about different protocols or security, that should be handled by the infrastructure and the platform. So removed all of that. So making it a lot easier for the teams now. And as I said in the beginning, the whole API life cycle is fully automatic, and the biggest complaint we hear at the moment is from the teams are, "We don't see Kong." No, you don't see it because we have a pipeline. But that's the biggest thing.

Paul Nashawaty

>> But isn't that a good thing?

Jonas Persson

>> That's a very good thing. But there's a lot of talks about how we changed this, and how Kong was a big part of it from a centralized to more decentralized adoption. So the teams are actually curious, where is it? But it is behind the pipeline and you just worry about building your functionality.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I think that makes sense. Focus on what you're doing. Whatever happens under the covers just work.

Jonas Persson

>> Yeah, exactly.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So let's talk about some of those other challenges. So you had some heritage way of doing things, you had complexity issues. What are some of the other challenges you ran into with regards to modernizing?

Jonas Persson

>> Biggest challenge is our history. We have not made it easy for ourselves. Then of course we have a long history. So we have tried every integration possible in the world. And even now we're building up the new world with APIs and products, but we still have files, and we have MQ, and we have Kafka, and we have broker, and we have ESB. We need to start removing that complexity from the old world. And whenever you do that, they have a cost efficiency, but you don't have a business value. And that's where it gets, where should we focus?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, there's a lot of conversation right now in my world of app dev, there's a lot of conversation abridging the gap between heritage environments and new environments. Everyone wants to modernize, they want to get to a containerized environment, they want to move to a new approach and utilize the standardized approach, but there's still this legacy or heritage environment that they have to maintain. How are you overcoming some of those challenges?

Jonas Persson

>> It's quite a challenge. And then at the same time, we're doing this, the whole API journey, moving from monolith to more products, component-based architecture. At the same time we're moving to cloud, multi-cloud, and now we're moving to the AI world. So everything is happening at the same time, but we have to sort it out from, where can we gain from a bank the best? Where is at the moment where we can have a business opportunity?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Banking is super competitive, because you have a lot of competition out there that's certainly game for that.

Jonas Persson

>> We had for example, in the custody area, which is a small segment, and our customers in that area is like large financial institutions. Usually the sales process is very long. You start having some talks, and a year after you finally set a deal. And in that area for another customer, we published an API on our external developer portal. A few days afterwards, a customer we have never talked to, just, "Hey, you have an API, I really like it. Can we start engaging?" So you see the power of APIs and exposing them externally. If they're good, then we'll document it.

Paul Nashawaty

>> How is that changing with regards to agents, and AI agents, and using those APIs, and how is that working?

Jonas Persson

>> That's where we see the next opportunity, especially for large corporates in that world. We have a lot of, lot of data and you have a complex environment. That's where we see you can use it to really innovate to take the next steps.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Are you currently doing that today?

Jonas Persson

>> Yeah, we're working on it. We're working on it, yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. So are you looking at different LLMs and-

Jonas Persson

>> Yeah. Yeah. We have a big cooperation with Nvidia. Nvidia is setting up an AI center in Sweden where we are a financier of that.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Nice, nice. So you're at the early stages. You've taken a number of steps to modernize. What are some of the other benefits that maybe with Kong and some of the tech stack, what are some of the benefits that you had? I know it sounds like frictionless is one.

Jonas Persson

>> Yeah, from the beginning with Kong, they have really, how should I put it? They've been this partner who has pushed us in a good way forward, not holding us back, but not at the same time pushing us too hard. Because we are still a bank. We need to have to take these steps and we need to have to control whatever, who's doing what, and who's consuming what service and so on. And now I think we're going to have the same principles. The teams, they're going to have knowledge in building the product, but now we're going to use AI to enhance that and take those next steps, but really focus on their product. Not thinking about too much of that if I'm in that cloud using that engine or that engine.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. A lot of times I come to these vendor shows and especially when they're announcing new products, it's usually something that's a few years out for a lot of organizations. So what's being announced today usually is something that is adopted, but it's adopted next year or year after. Do you see from the announcements, and it sounds like you're very connected with Kong, do you see from those announcements-

Jonas Persson

>> Because we need to prepare, so we need to look at it today, even though it might have an impact maybe one or two years ahead of us. Well, we have to be prepared. We have to have from an enterprise view how we're going to going to use it. Where should we use it first? So we can't just wait.

Paul Nashawaty

>> All right, Jonas, so let me ask you this. If we're sitting here in 2026 at Kong's API Summit, and we're sitting here having the same conversation, where do you fast-forward and see what you're doing and these initiatives and how you adopted it

Jonas Persson

>> I'm hoping that AI is helping us to drive the business. And also that we have started, I'm saying started, but maybe we've taken a few steps on trying to re-modernize our old legacy, using AI for that also.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Nice, nice. Oh, any parting words you'd like to leave with the audience?

Jonas Persson

>> It's a fun journey and it's interesting. That's what I can say.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Well it definitely is going to continue to be interesting. AI is not making things easy, right?

Jonas Persson

>> Exactly.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, Jonas, I really appreciate you being on today. This has been really great, really great having you on, your insights and your perspective of what you're doing really amplifies what we're seeing at the show.

Jonas Persson

>> Thank you.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, thank you. And I want to thank the audience for watching. I am Paul Nashawaty and I'm coming to you live from the show floor at Kahn's API Summit 2025 on theCUBE, your leading source of tech news.