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In Akamai’s 2026 financial-services study, 96% of surveyed organizations reported at least one API-related security incident in 2025. That is a striking warning, but it does not mean 96% of fintech firms suffered a confirmed data breach: the survey included banks, brokerages, insurers, and fintech organizations, and counted API-related incidents rather than breaches alone.
The concern is practical. APIs connect financial services’ payments, identity checks, lending, fraud systems, customer apps, and third-party services. Yet many surveyed organizations said they lacked a complete picture of which APIs exposed sensitive data—a visibility gap that makes it harder to manage access, test risk, and meet obligations that vary by jurisdiction.
How common are API security incidents in the financial services sector?
Akamai’s 2026 API Security Risks in Financial Services ebook reports that 96% of the 310 financial-services security leaders surveyed across 10 countries said their organization experienced at least one API-related security incident in 2025. The sample included enterprises such as banks, brokerages, insurers, and fintech organizations; it is not a census of fintech firms worldwide. The figure reflects respondents’ reports, not independently verified breach records.
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Incidents also recur: among organizations affected, 48% reported four or more API incidents in a 12-month span, according to the same study. These figures indicate a widespread operational problem in the surveyed group, but should not be read as proof that every incident involved stolen customer data.
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A separate Akamai survey of 1,840 security professionals across six industries and 10 countries found that 87% of all respondents experienced an API-related incident in the past year. That broader result has a different population and timeframe from the dedicated financial-services study, so the two percentages should not be combined.
What is the average financial impact of an API security incident for these organizations?
Akamai reported an average annual financial impact of approximately US$620,000 from API security incidents for financial-services organizations. This is an annual impact figure, not an average cost per incident. The survey does not establish that every organization incurred this amount or that the figure applies to all financial firms.
Which types of API incidents occur most frequently in this industry?
In the financial-services findings, API data breaches or leaks were the most commonly reported incident type, cited by 40% of respondents. Attacks on AI-linked APIs were also frequent, reported by 39%. These are survey findings about incident types, not evidence that AI adoption caused the incidents.
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesThe combination matters because APIs can expose or change account, identity, and payment information, while AI-connected services may introduce additional data flows and integration points. An integration’s familiarity or business value does not, on its own, establish that its permissions and data handling are appropriate.
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What is the primary root cause of API security incidents for financial firms?
Akamai’s detailed financial-services findings say 65% of respondents cited API misconfiguration as a leading underlying cause. This is respondent attribution, not an independently demonstrated cause for every event. The ebook also contains a graphic with a 64% figure for misconfiguration; its detailed key-finding text gives 65%, so the latter is used here.
Misconfiguration is only one part of the risk. The OWASP API Security Top 10 – 2023 highlights issues including broken object-level authorization, broken authentication, excessive exposure or modification of object properties, unrestricted resource consumption, broken function-level authorization, sensitive business-flow abuse, security misconfiguration, improper inventory management, and unsafe consumption of third-party APIs.
Why is the current level of API visibility considered insufficient for compliance?
In Akamai’s ebook, 78% of financial-services organizations said they had a full API inventory, but 51% said they did not know which inventoried APIs returned sensitive data. The ebook’s executive summary separately says 27% had both a complete inventory and knowledge of which APIs exposed sensitive data. These are the study’s stated measures; they should not be combined into a new inferred percentage.
An endpoint list alone cannot show what customer, identity, account, or payment information an API returns or changes. Without that mapping, an organization may struggle to identify data owners, apply appropriate access controls, and assess the legal or contractual duties that apply in its jurisdictions. The survey does not itself determine whether a particular organization is compliant or noncompliant.
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Regulatory and resilience obligations depend on jurisdiction and context. The Federal Reserve’s Cybersecurity and Financial System Resilience Report series provides regulator context, but it is not the source of Akamai’s 96% API-incident statistic.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What should financial firms do to reduce API risk?
The survey points to gaps in inventory, sensitive-data visibility, and security practice; the following controls address those weaknesses. OWASP’s taxonomy offers a useful way to organize API-specific review, but no single control or platform can guarantee that incidents will not occur.
- Keep an API inventory current. Track hosts, endpoints, deployed versions, and ownership, including APIs used by AI applications and third-party services. Remove or restrict deprecated, debug, and otherwise unnecessary interfaces.
- Map sensitive data flows. Identify which APIs return or modify customer, identity, account, and payment data. Classify the data and have the responsible owners determine applicable legal and contractual duties for each jurisdiction.
- Authorize every object and function. Check whether the authenticated user is entitled to access the specific account, payment, or record named in a request, and whether they may perform the requested function. A valid login is not proof of permission to access a client-supplied identifier.
- Constrain object properties. Return only necessary fields, restrict which fields clients may change, validate response schemas, and avoid automatically binding untrusted client-supplied fields to internal objects.
- Limit resource consumption. Set defensible limits on request size, batch operations, returned records, execution time, and paid downstream calls. Unbounded use can create denial-of-service risk and unexpected expense.
- Test throughout development and operation. Include security checks in the API lifecycle and CI/CD pipeline rather than testing functionality alone. Monitor runtime behavior and investigate unusual access, data transfers, and calls to AI-linked endpoints.
- Review integrations as part of the attack surface. Assess the permissions, data flows, and security posture of third-party and AI-connected APIs instead of assuming an established integration is safe.
These actions align with the risks described in the OWASP API Security Top 10. OWASP’s guidance on broken object-level authorization and unrestricted resource consumption is particularly relevant to financial APIs handling records and costly downstream operations.
Why are AI-linked APIs part of the concern?
In Akamai’s 2026 financial-services study, 41% of respondents ranked securing AI technologies as their top cybersecurity priority, while 74% said their focus on API security had increased over the previous year. Those results show that respondents see AI and API security as pressing priorities; they do not prove that AI systems caused the incidents or that more AI use necessarily increases breach rates.
Sean Lyons, Akamai’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Application and Infrastructure Security, said in the company’s April 28, 2026 press release: “If you’re adopting AI, API security can’t be an afterthought. You need the foundation to actually trust the AI systems you’re building.” This is a vendor executive’s view, not independent expert consensus.
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