Forem: Serena

FinTech Platforms Use Email API to Power Communications

Serena — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 15:30:00 +0000

FinTech is evolving at the speed of light thanks to blockchain, cryptocurrencies, AI, and one technology you might not expect: an email API. They’re disrupting an industry that’s riddled by legacy systems and processes using APIs to build better software and meet the needs of modern consumers.

With the help of an email API, FinTech companies are able to focus and execute on automation, customization, and personalization with more agility than legacy companies who are often constrained by more traditional systems. As a result, FinTech products are going to market faster with embedded communications that enable users to communicate with context.

The Nylas Email API saves financial organizations months of development time by providing the most comprehensive out of the box email integration available. The Nylas Email API acts as a layer of abstraction on top of all email providers including Gmail, Outlook.com, IMAP, and the rest. With just a few lines of code, developers can add full-featured, bi-directional email sync to their applications with ease.

Email APIs Increase User Engagement in Financial CRMs

The average financial advisor serves about 156 customers on a rolling basis. With an email API, financial CRMs save advisors hours of time each week by centralizing communications (and syncing them between users’ inboxes and the financial CRM), task management, and automation of manual data entry.

Financial CRM Wealthbox decided to build an embedded email client called Wealthbox Mail for the Wealthbox platform to send email and sync with users’ email services- and they turned to the Nylas Email API to do it. Nylas powers email sending, analytics, and templates within Wealthbox, and provides two-way email, calendar, and contacts sync between every Wealthbox users’ inbox and the Wealthbox CRM.

Email APIs Improve Client Communication for Tax Professionals

FinTech companies are also leveraging APIs to build email features for CPAs and other tax professionals that help them keep a record of all email communications with a given client in one central location. This helps tax professionals make informed decisions about their clients’ filing needs and enables them to be more efficient with their time.

Tax professionals handle documents filled with important data and often have several touchpoints of communication with each client they serve. Every invoice, paystub, and financial legality document is imperative to their overall filing process.

Companies like Canopy, a leading tax resolution platform that provides practice management software, save their users time through file sharing and storage, online payments, client intake surveys, requests and reminders to improve communication and information sharing.

With just a few lines of code, the Nylas Email API helped Canopy build features that allow their users to send, receive, and track emails all from within the Canopy platform. This system of record helps tax professionals organize their clients information and saves them the headache of having to save each communication into an associated file on a computer. With this feature, Canopy users can manage their work more efficiently, giving them more time focus on more creative tasks that require human touch.

The Bull Market Goes Beyond Email APIs

FinTech is making big leaps to meet consumer demands, and using more than just the Nylas API to do it. Many modern finance platforms use Stripe for payments, Twilio for text messages, Plaid to connect to bank accounts, and many other APIs that help companies go to market faster with features consumers love.

With these APIs, everyone from the developers building the apps to the end-users wins.

HR Software Companies Use The Nylas Calendar API to Accelerate Time to Market

Serena — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 16:30:00 +0000

Automation is all around us, from self-driving cars to automatic payments, from virtual assistants like Alexa and Echo to check-in kiosks at the airports. Automation has fundamentally changed how businesses operate: it has increased efficiency, transparency, and work-life balance by handling tedious and repetitive tasks and leaving the more human tasks to humans. Which is why automation for HR software is so prevalent, and so important.

Companies like Beamery, Lever, and CATS (an applicant tracking system) all provide streamlined recruiting and HR processes to their users - and for a good reason. According to WorkMarket’s 2020 In(Sight) Report, 53% of employees state that automation can help save them up to 2 work hours a day which accounts to six weeks (240 hours) of time per year, while 78% of business leaders could save up to 3 work hours a day which totals up to nine weeks (360 hours) of time per year.

You can build scheduling sync between your HR software application and your user’s calendars using the Nylas Calendar API. Save your end-users hundreds of working hours by automating scheduling tasks for them.

Empower Users to Streamline Recruiting with Calendar Sync

Recruiting is a complex, multi-faceted process with multiple variables and little room for error: from creating job postings to resume screening, conducting interviews, vetting candidates, gathering feedback - and it can take up to weeks to nail them down if not months. Automation can help make recruiting a seamless process.

With the Nylas calendar API, developers can build full calendar CRUD (create, read, update and delete capabilities), and bi-directional calendar sync to expedite and improve the hiring process for recruiters. The faster the hiring process, the better the chances are of recruiting the best candidate.

Users can schedule interviews and calls all from within your HR software’s interface. Multiple interviews can be arranged in just one click, free/busy schedules are shown, and the event is added to the calendars of all the attendees.

Empower Users to Organize Meetings with Calendar Sync

Meetings are a great way to get the team on the same page, discuss strategies, and plan for the future. If meetings are not appropriately managed, they can take up 31 hours of the work time per month.

Even though organizing a meeting can be simple, the difficulty level increases as the number of attendees grow - sending emails, getting everyone's schedule, making phone calls, finding a room, arranging the resources.

The more time is spent organizing a meeting, that's less time spent towards a higher priority task.

Adding calendar sync to meeting room booking software eradicates the need to book everything individually. Meeting organizers save hours, giving them more time to spend on meeting preparation.

Fountain is an applicant tracking and recruiting platform which helps companies around the world hire hourly workers at scale using self-service interview booking, automation, machine learning, and customizable workflows.

When Fountain users book meetings, the choose a block of time surrounded by other work meetings or personal plans. With the help of Nylas Calendar API, Fountain's scheduling system work in harmony with their users’ whole schedule.

In a nutshell, it will keep records of every meeting in one place. Every time you create a new place to store data, you give yourself more to maintain and more chances for details to slip through the cracks.

Throughout the hiring process, candidates will go through different stages. The Nylas Calendar API will track the journey of your applicant and will also keep track of any schedule change of either the organization or the candidate.

Next Steps

Above all, automating any function within your business frees up time, reduces human error and creates more efficiency. These are just a handful of the ways the Nylas calendar API can create better experiences for businesses and employees.

For more information and to get started with a free trial, click here.

How to Get Full Calendar Sync & CRUD with the Nylas Calendar API

Serena — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 15:03:00 +0000

Need to build a calendar integration? Power your application with real-time, secure calendar sync with as little as four lines of code. Find out how the Nylas Calendar API can help.

We have several meetings and appointments to keep track of on a daily basis, be it personal or professional. We heavily rely on our calendars to track our events. Come to think of it, all of the events in our lives are actually scattered between different calendar providers.

All these calendars have their own systemic features that process data in different ways. We would need to build independent connections for individual providers. On top of that, we’d also have to maintain those connections and ensure the software works with past, present, and future versions of every provider’s API updates (sometimes they introduce breaking changes that hinder their functionality).

You have the choice to build unique connections with every individual calendar provider, or you can use the Nylas Calendar API and save months of developer time through one simple integration.

This way, you can spend more time focusing on the features you love to build.

Our Calendar API powers your application with real-time, secure calendar sync. Why is it important you ask? It's important because building scheduling and calendar sync features are mission-critical for many software companies.

Without Nylas, developers could easily take 12 months or more to build these connections with each calendar provider where the infrastructure varies between Gmail, Outlook.com, Exchange, Office 365 and the rest.

In this post, we will see how you can avoid all that by diving into some of the features and functionality of our Calendar API.

The Nylas Calendar API

The Nylas Calendar API acts as a layer of abstraction on top of all the calendar providers. You can streamline the scheduling process and updates in real-time.

When an account authenticates to Nylas, one of our sync servers will claim the account and automatically start syncing calendar data into Nylas' database. Each account connected to Nylas can have multiple calendars, and each calendar can have a collection of individual events.

The calendar API accesses all of the information to secure a time that fits everyone's schedule. It can also give the person you're meeting with access to your calendar and lets them choose the time that works best.

Once the appointment slot is reserved, the calendar is updated instantly, so there is never a chance of double booking or missing a meeting.

Outlook.com Calendar Connectivity

If you’re building a software that needs calendar connectivity with Outlook.com, the APIs, services, and templates often end up causing more dependencies than solutions.

The Nylas Calendar API abstracts away all of the complexity of building an app that integrates with Outlook.com calendars and handles all product changes and API modifications, so you don’t experience outages or service disruptions.

Nylas streamlines calendar sync from Outlook.com and every other calendar provider (Gmail, Exchange, Office 365, and the rest) giving you a dependable API that intelligently adapts to any changes the calendar providers introduce.

Using the API, you have full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) capabilities through powerful API primitives. In addition to these, Nylas powers all the calendar features your customers require.

Booking and Cancellation

By having access to all the synced calendars and real-time updates, reservations and cancellations become easily manageable. From single events on team calendars to custom recurring events, the Nylas Calendar API handles it all.

You can update your plans from your calendar, and the changes will be reflected on the schedules of everyone affected in real-time.

Appointment Reminders and Task Scheduling

Whatever the reason behind a missed appointment, it can get expensive for your company. With Nylas, everyone gets automated appointment reminders to remind all parties of scheduled meetings.

The integration also has access to all the calendars which makes it easier to schedule tasks and makes deadline management a breeze.

Productivity Analytics

The API also receives productivity data by analyzing cross-team availability. It pulls data from the calendar and calculates the open rate, the click-through rate, the email usage (how many emails were sent and received) and the calendar meetings (how frequently the meetings were scheduled). It collects all this data to determine how time is being spent and helps provide a solution for how it can be improved.

Quick-start SDKs

With Nylas, you don’t have to build a calendar integration from scratch. We offer a suite of SDKs to get you started quickly so you can spend more time iterating features to your users’ exact specifications.

We offer SDKs in three core languages: Ruby, Node JS, and Python. With just a few lines of code, you can integrate Nylas into your app faster, maintain higher code quality, and free up time for building core features.

Security and Privacy

Enterprise-grade security and privacy controls have always been at the heart of what we do. The Nylas Calendar API encrypts 100% of data with military-grade security standards.

Here are some of the ways we protect and secure data in our infrastructure:

Transparency and Compliance - Certified: Nylas is SOC2 Certified, GDPR compliant, EU Privacy Shield Certified, and HIPAA ready.
Encryption and Access Control: User data is encrypted at rest using enterprise-grade standards.
Network Transport and Storage: Nylas systems enforce TLS for public and private networks, and only support certificates signed by well-known CAs.
Infrastructure and Physical Security: Our products run on AWS in a secure facility with active monitoring, total system logging, and security.

Ready to Get Started?

The Nylas Calendar API was built by developers, for developers, allowing you to share team calendars, link to specific meetings, schedule recurring meetings, and more.

Our Calendar API helps you develop connectivity into your application with ease.

For more on how to get started, click here.

The API Advantage for Android and iOS Application Developers

Serena — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 18:29:04 +0000

In the mobile application world, going to market quickly with the core features your users need is critical. That's why we created the Nylas API, to help developers build the mobile application of their dreams without having to worry about the communications layer.

Developers building mobile applications use the Stripe API for payments, the Twilio API for SMS, and the Nylas API for email, calendar and contacts. Nylas's email API, contacts API, and calendar API power Android and iOS applications for companies like Voiply (the cloud-based phone system) and Haystack CRM.

So what can you build with the Nylas API? Let's dive in.

Scheduling & Calendar Sync for Android and iOS applications

Ensure the end-users of your mobile app never miss a meeting by powering your application with calendar sync. The Nylas Calendar API connects to 100% of calendar providers, enabling scheduling and calendar sync features between your mobile application and your user's specific calendar provider (Google Calendar, Exchange Calendar, Outlook.com Calendar, and the rest).

HaystackCRM, a mobile-first CRM for contact and sales pipeline management, built scheduling & calendar sync into their application with the Nylas API.

Now users can choose to connect their calendar accounts to view and schedule events within HaystackCRM.

(Haystack Calendar Sync)

Build Calendar Sync in Weeks, Not Months

In just one internal hackathon, it took one engineer a single day to build out their powerful scheduling tool by simply using the Nylas Calendar API as their framework. The result was a powerful scheduling tool that united all users’ calendar synching, regardless of platform.

Feature-Rich Calendar Functionality

They also built out feature-rich functionality that provided everything a user would want in to schedule meetings. Users can fully create, read, update, and delete calendar events in real time. As a result, all users are able to quickly book and cancel appointments, set appointment reminders, and even view cross-platform productivity analytics — all within the iOS app.

Key Takeaway: With a powerful calendar API, your team gets a headstart building other core features while reducing devops hours.

Email Sync on Android for iOS Devices

HaystackCRM also uses the Nylas API to remove friction from their CRM-to-email integration. They needed to find a way to integrate their CRM within Office365, Outlook.com, Exchange, and IMAP email providers in a way that scaled with their business. Using the Nylas API has given HaystackCRM more options of email management beyond the initial offering. Features powered by the Nylas API allow HaystackCRM users to maintain a level of comfort of using previous email addresses, email clients and calendars while moving forward with HaystackCRM.

(Haystack Email sync)

Two-Way Email Sync

The Nylas email API provides seamless two-way email, calendar, and contacts sync between a single user’s inbox and the customer’s CRM. From there, users could compose and send emails from within the app — saving a wealth of time by minimizing the need for context switching and eliminating any need for manual data entry between the CRM and the app.

Group Email Accounts

The customer’s app was also better able to create more sophisticated email-to-CRM synching features. For instance, with the aid of the Nylas email API, CRM users could great group email accounts to enable quicker and more efficient collaboration across the team. For instance, if a team member was on vacation or out sick, any team member can simply log into the app and see recent customer interactions right within the app.

Key Takeaway: While there is often a great deal of complexity when it comes to developing features for cross-platform CRM integrations, an intuitive API allows developers to build powerful, new CRM features on the fly.

Contacts Sync for Android and iOS apps

VoIPLy provides simple and reliable phone solutions to help businesses serve their clients and customers better. Their cloud-based unified communication system is packed with more than 60 powerful phone features, enabling users to do business anywhere, anytime.

When customers click on contacts, the application integrates with Nylas to sync all of their contacts. VoIPLy has also created a Calendar App for their phone system, in which enables the system to read off events on calendars to callers.

(Users Authenticate Contacts Sync via the Nylas API)

Up-to-date Contact Profiles with Contact Sync

The Nylas Contacts API syncs profile information from user's contacts books to mobile applications and back. If a profile photo, email address, physical address, phone number, or any other critical information is updated in the user's address book, your mobile application is updated immediately as well.

Quick and Friction-Free Integration

Using Nylas docs, integrating the API was virtually instant. Within a week, the developer team was able to pull together a proof-of-concept and deploy the API into their production environment.

Key Takeaway: The right contacts API dramatically shortens your feature development time, ensuring that you are building the most dynamic contacts-syncing functionality possible — and quickly.

These are just a few of the many use cases our customers are using to evolve their email and calendar functions within their applications. Are you ready to transform your Android or iOS application with Nylas? Get started here.

Process Makes Perfect: The Nylas Playbook for Hiring Awesome Engineers

Serena — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 19:36:37 +0000

We’re hiring! It’s a common refrain at any meetup or conference these days. But how can you be sure an engineer has the skills your team needs both now and for the future? How do you assess cultural fit? And how do you make the interview process fantastic for your team and each candidate? These are all questions we’ve been considering at Nylas.

As a rapidly growing startup, our team wasn’t sourcing the well-rounded and diverse candidate pool that reflected our values.

As a way of coming up with a solution, we created our own hiring playbook. It’s an iterative process, but we wanted to share some of our insights in hopes that they help other tech leaders hire great talent.

Identify What Makes Your Company Unique

Playbook Strategy #1: Find your company’s unique value to candidates and broadcast it so that they understand the culture around your company before they apply.

As a team, we knew we needed to find a way to distinguish ourselves from other startups looking for world-class engineers.

But how and what makes us different?

We put our heads together to come up with a plan to communicate the story and character of our company. We discovered an awesome website called Keyvalues which flips the traditional company hiring page pitch from what we do to who we are. We thought about what values define us and came up with a set of ideals:

Engineering-driven: Our engineering goals drive other company objectives
Work/life balance: We respect your life outside of work
Customers come first: Our developer success engineers build the bridge between our customer and product
Open communication: We have weekly all-hands meetings to keep the entire company aligned
Actively practice inclusion: We provide tools and training to ensure that our processes are collaborative
Start-to-finish ownership: We have an open, autonomous structure and everyone is a full-stack engineer
Open source contributor: Our team contributes to open source projects like Debian, mypy and others. We are also active members and present at conferences like Pycon and Pybay, and other local meetups
Community: We like to break bread together both over our daily catered lunches, and for post-work dinners

We also open-sourced our employee handbook earlier this year so that anyone can see our company policies. This helps us answer a lot of common questions about leave, benefits, remote work, and more. We worked very hard on our benefits package, and highlighted the elements that we pride ourselves on, such as our caregiver leave policy which grants both parents with paid time off and includes care-giving time for the elderly.

After having both of these efforts visible for a couple of months we’ve heard from multiple candidates that they were able to understand our culture before ever stepping in the door. This has been great, as it lets us focus our on-sites on deeper discussions. We knew that we were onto something with these changes, and these transparency efforts became the first part our playbook.

Diversify Your Pool of Candidates

Playbook Strategy #2: Implement ways to infuse diversity and inclusion into your company ecosystem and create partnerships with underrepresented organizations that you support.

Our efforts on transparency served as a very important foundational step towards meeting our goals, but it’s only one piece of establishing the kind of company we want to be. All throughout the software engineering world we’ve seen discussions about the lack of diversity on engineering teams. We wanted to come up with a way to ensure that we were doing our part to help bridge the divide.

Our VP of Engineering, Tomasz Finc, was a mentor for Code2040 last summer and had such a impactful experience that we’ve partnered with them for our summer intern program. Code2040 is leading the way in supporting more black and latinx students in engineering and were thankful to have our first intern this summer.

We’ve also been working with HackBright Academy to support more women in engineering. HackBright is the leading SF Bay Area company engineering school for women and we’re excited to grow our company with their support. There is still a lot more work that has to be done to better equalize the engineering world but we are very proud to work directly with like-minded organizations to move it forward.

We now actively have a practice of discussing ways to give rise to supporting more underrepresented candidate pools. As part of our playbook, we implemented a recurring cross- company hiring bias meeting in which we each take part in ensuring we are doing all we can do to integrate these groups into our hiring efforts.

Nail The Interview Experience

Playbook Strategy # 3: Collect feedback about your interview process from every candidate and when reviewing a potential new hire, create a standardized process in order to minimize bias.

Once we invite an applicant for to interview with us on-site, it’s really important that we create an experience that makes them comfortable and allows them to best showcase their skills. Each of our interviews uses a standard set of questions that are judged using a rubric to minimize bias. We focus on how a candidate aligns with our company values. We strive to keep our interview loops as diverse as possible and incorporate departments outside of engineering to participate. Our process also consists of each interviewer providing feedback in an individualized way through Lever before reviewing any other thoughts about a candidate from other interviewers. After this process, all of the feedback is discussed together.

At the end of each interview we make sure to send out a survey to better understand how we could improve our interview process. This part of our playbook has generated an abundance of observations for us to implement for the next interview round, allowing us to get better with the process each time we go through it. We hope to continue to grow and learn from all of these efforts.

Happy hiring!

Interested in Becoming a Nylanaut?

At Nylas, we empower our employees to reach their full potential. We believe that one of the main inspirations of being at a startup is charting your own destiny. We love meeting creative people who are looking for new challenges! We’re hiring for our NYC and SF offices; you can check out our current openings here and get in touch by emailing!

Co-Authored by Tomasz Finc and Serena Malkani