My experience using Wema Bank’s ALAT API has been pretty frustrating, especially the developer onboarding.
The biggest problem is how manual everything feels.
There’s a playground, but you can’t simply generate API credentials and start testing. Verification is handled through back-and-forth emails instead of having a proper onboarding flow where you submit your documents, see their verification status, and know exactly what’s pending.
Even after verification, the test dashboard barely feels like a dashboard.
There’s no useful transaction history, no charts, no visualization of money coming in or going out, and no real interface for seeing what is happening in your test environment. It mostly feels like another version of the API documentation showing request/response formats.
Even something as basic as configuring callback URLs has to be done by emailing them the URLs you want to use.
Normally, I’d expect to log into a developer dashboard, add or change my callback URLs myself, generate test credentials, view transactions/webhook events, and debug my integration from there.
The API itself may work, but the developer experience around it makes integration unnecessarily difficult.
Wema/ALAT really needs a proper self-service developer portal.
Wema ALAT API is torture😭😭😭😭, the UI and documentation is ass, user experience is also ass