'TM Forum’s Open APIs support essential business processes, enhancing customer and user support with faster time-to-market and reduced costs.' Mats Nilsson, Head of APIs & Interoperability, Telia Company
My API Story: Leading API integration and transformation
Tell us about yourself and your job
I lead the API domain at Telia Company, aiming to decouple our IT stacks with reusable APIs across all markets. My role involves ensuring seamless, coherent API management from start to finish, including hybrid deployment in all our countries, benefitting customers and users with quicker, better services.
My background is in the Telco BSS area, where I’ve had roles from developer to Chief Architect. Previously, I established and scaled the technical unit in our innovation company, Telia Division X, including APIs and decoupling.
Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?
Standardization is key for both our company and the industry. Harmonizing our interfaces enhances reusability, speed, vendor independence and cost control. It also fosters collaboration and joint solutions across companies and with partners. TM Forum Open APIs are the industry standard – the most mature, collaborated on and therefore the best available.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?
TMF620 – Product Catalog
TMF622 – Product Ordering
TMF633 – Service Catalog
TMF637 – Product Inventory
TMF638 – Service Inventory
TMF641 – Service Ordering
Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?
These APIs are the most common across our markets and the most closely associated with our transformation assets.
How do you use those APIs?
We are in a very ambitious transformation at Telia Company, and these APIs ensure our assets are decoupled and reusable across markets.
They support our essential business processes, enhancing customer and user support with faster time-to-market and reduced costs. We implement them on both target and legacy systems (through facades), making them key to our omnichannel architecture.
How have you benefited from using those APIs?
We treat APIs as core assets, maintaining their reusability and TM Forum conformance. This gives us a vendor-agnostic common integration interface across our markets, which offers flexibility, easier implementation, and cost savings.
The APIs decouple target applications and legacy systems, significantly improving processes like end-to-end order processing, reducing time from weeks to minutes.
Where do you use them?
Across multiple markets and segments, including Sweden, Finland, Norway and Lithuania for B2B, B2C & B2O.
Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?
We use TM Forum Open APIs, part of ODA, as the foundation for our IT and the order, provisioning and billing of our products and services. They support all customer interactions and are part of our omnichannel architecture, where we also implement experience APIs close to the channels. For external exposure, we use them with Freemove and MEF LSO for partner and customer-facing APIs, enabling efficient customer management.