The developer-first bureau integration you can ship in one sprint

3 min read
|
June 8 2026
Real Time Signal

Ask any engineering team to scope a bureau integration and watch the shadow of fear dance across their face. They will warn you it could be a six‑month project, not because the API calls are hard, but because everything around the integration is slow and opaque.

That’s the legacy experience. We just integrated and went live with a bank in one sprint.

The legacy experience

Legacy bureau integrations have earned their reputation. Bespoke configuration processes. Proprietary data formats requiring custom parsers. Opaque error responses that tell you something failed but not what or why. Test environments that do not reflect production behaviour. Support routed through account managers rather than engineers.

To put that into perspective: for one of our partners, the critical path to going live was not the FCA or their main systems provider. It was their legacy bureau. Let that land for a second.

How a bank went live in one sprint

The technical work of integrating a bureau API is no different from any other third-party REST API integration. The reason it has always taken longer is not the engineering. It is everything around it. We built ours to work like any modern API should.

This means:

  • A complete Open API spec ready for any AI coding assistant like Claude Code or Cursor to generate a client
  • A developer portal with dynamic examples coded in 20 languages
  • A Postman collection with sample requests for every scenario, not a spreadsheet of field codes to decode
  • Credentials issued in under a day (often within half a day), so you can start testing in sandbox as soon as you’re ready
  • A sandbox that takes real calls from day one with test data, using the same endpoints you will use in production (POST /affordability, POST /credit)
  • Actionable fault messages that tell you exactly what failed and where, not a code to look up
  • A single central partner configuration, not five systems and three teams

Our dedicated integration engineers have full visibility into your sandbox API calls. They can diagnose failing requests, often before you have had a chance to send an email.

If you want to run against live data before it affects any live decisions, we can set you up in production so you can run in “shadow mode”. You can store the outputs, review them, and validate performance in the background.

We found the integration with Infact to be very straightforward. The documentation was thorough and the Infact team were very responsive to any queries we had. Credentials were provided almost immediately after a short sign off call. The team were very impressed at the quick turnaround especially at a time when the customer is looking to go live.

- Redline, who run the decisioning system for Finclusion

To give you a sense of what a real request to the Affordability API looks like:

{
    "purpose": "Quotation",
    "firstName": "Isobel",
    "lastName": "Tucker",
    "dob": "1999-01-21",
    "address": {
        "line1": "5 Moorside View",
        "city": "Glossop",
        "postalCode": "SK13 8BD"
    },
    "application": {
        "applicationId": "APP-2834",
        "employment": "FullTimeEmployed",
        "dependants": 2,      
        "income": {
          "declaredGross": 2450,
          "householdGross": 3400
        }
    }
}

The response comes back with granular income and expenditure metrics in a single API call. All clear and readable.

What still takes time

From there, the work that stretches the timeline is the sequence of internal steps on your side:

  1. Mapping your internal data structures to the clear request format
  2. Getting credit risk and engineering aligned on what the response means for your policy
  3. Fitting the release into your deployment cycle
  4. Configuring the API results into your decision process, policy rules, and monitoring it during release

The API is live, the sandbox is open, the spec is there. What takes time after that is on your side of the stack. We will not be your bottleneck.

See what the integration actually looks like

Ask us for the spec and get a call in the diary. We can walk your engineers through what the integration actually involves and make the first request on the call.

Speak to our team →

Is your team ready for real-time credit data?