Integrate with VR Benefits in an agile, simple, and safe way

* In partnership with Vinícius Sousa

Before talking about the integration with VR Benefits partners enabled by APIs, we want to share a little bit of the context on how the company operates.

What is VR Benefits?

Founded in 1977, VR Benefits is a pioneer in the benefits segment and has become an eponym for the category of meal and food voucher cards in Brazil. Its innovative solutions are aimed at entrepreneurs, small, medium-sized, and large companies, commercial establishments, and workers, always with the objective of facilitating the lives of customers in a convenient, fast, safe, and digital way. The Food, Meal, Auto and Culture products benefit 1.4 million people and are accepted in over 400,000 establishments, in 5,000 cities.

And how were the APIs designed?

VR Benefits promotes digital transformation and brings innovation to the customer, enabling and connecting the relationship channels (IVR, Chatbot, WhatsApp, Facebook, Mobile, Portals) through APIs. Therefore, it provides the APIs so that external partners can develop integrations that accept these benefits, such as accepting meal/food vouchers directly in payment methods services, which brings more types of payment to the business.

With the partnership with Sensedia, it is assisted by the consulting and developer experience team, focused on best practices, support for developers and continuous evolution, with the following main actions:

• Dissemination of the culture of APIs;
• Definition and evolution of reference architecture and architectural standards;
• Definition, evolution and automation of processes (Governance, DX, API development);
• Support in defining the Solution Architecture for internal Squads;
• Support to external VR partners in the integration with APIs, assisting them and answering potential questions related to use;
• Evolution of the Developer Portal.

To better understand how VR Benefits managed to reconcile the use of APIs and how this can benefit and accelerate the usage by partners of the benefits provided by VR, we will demonstrate below some of the APIs available:

Main Business Processes with APIs

Sales Relationship with APIs

Process related to sales of VR Benefits products, through independent (external) salespeople and employees. The APIs listed in this process help to make sales with VR Benefits' customers more agile, as the sales steps, in addition to being automated, are easier to integrate.

Issuance (core)

Process related to operations with VR Benefits products. The APIs listed in this process help both VR Benefits' customers and their beneficiaries to have a unique experience, as service in several channels (IVR, Whatsapp, Facebook, Mobile) became easier and faster to integrate.

APIs and Acquisitions

Process related to the use of VR Benefits products in commercial establishments. The APIs listed in this process help in the engagement of merchants and leading new ones to use VR Benefits' products, increasingly strengthening the relationship between them.

The APIs were created considering the agility and availability of use for external partners, thus managing to accelerate the entry and use of VR Benefits' information.In addition to creating these APIs for use, it is extremely important to make them available on an official and suitable channel, such as the Developer Portal.

This portal is part of the partners' onboarding process and is the gateway for starting the development. In it, the necessary information for the development and consumption of APIs will be available, such as guides, swaggers, access to creation, monitoring of use approvals and management of access keys (app and token), as well as having a direct service channel for answering questions and supporting usage issues.

With all this, the APIs strategy is helping VR Benefits to become a great digital company and increasing its portfolio of partnerships and customers, creating an ecosystem in the benefits segment.