What the new version of “180 integration” means and why it’s detrimental to your business

Welcome to another edition of the Integration Insider—a weekly newsletter that provides the insights you need to build, maintain, and manage product integrations successfully.

In this week's edition, we're breaking down a problematic approach to integrations that some of our competitors use.

Note: This article original appeared on our blog .

A 180 integration has, historically, been a synonym for a one-way sync with a 3rd-party API. In other words, it either involves reading data from or writing data to a platform through API requests and responses.

However, specific integration vendors have managed to muddy the waters by carving out another meaning for the term—confusing both prospects and clients.

This rebranded version of 180 integration fundamentally differs from its predecessor. More than that, it presents an approach to product integrations that carries performance issues and security risks.

To better understand why a 180 integration is worth avoiding at all costs, we’ll break down how it functions and highlight the top drawbacks of using it.?

Note: For the purposes of this article, we’re only referring to 180 integrations that are provided by 3rd-party platforms. If a company provides 180 integrations directly to clients, many of the drawbacks highlighted below aren’t as—if at all—applicable.

180 integration overview

Assuming you use a 180 integration to power a product integration, here’s how it’d work: Every time you make an API call to the 3rd-party integration provider, the provider—or, more likely, whoever the provider contracts the work out to—manually logs into an end-user’s platform (i.e. your client’s platform), downloads or copies the data they care about, and adds it to the integration provider’s platform. The integration provider then normalizes this data and shares it back to you.

The drawbacks of 180 integrations

The issues associated with using 180 integrations come in a few different forms:

Let’s take a closer look at each:

Disappointing customer experience

Your clients aren’t just giving their login credentials to an integration provider (which, in and of itself, would be bad enough); they’re giving it to an individual or organization that the integration provider contracts this work out to.?

Your clients don’t know who this contractor(s) is—let alone who the integration provider is—, so they’ll likely feel deeply uncomfortable with giving them access to their company’s sensitive and business-critical information. Merely asking clients for their login credentials and having to explain how your 180 integration works can, therefore, be all it takes to diminish their trust in your business, along with their appetite for using your product.?

High security risk

Asking clients to pass their login credentials along to someone they don’t know isn’t just uncomfortable—it’s also unsafe.

Since the 3rd-party contractor needs admin-level permissions to your clients’ applications, they’ll likely have access to data that leads your clients to violate data privacy laws and regulations, such as HIPAA and GDPR. The 3rd-party contractor can also use the data in ways that harm your clients and their employees or customers, whether that’s changing the data in your clients’ applications, removing the clients’ users from their applications, and even selling the information from your clients’ applications on the dark web.

Poor performance

Given the fact that the process is entirely manual on the integration provider’s end, you’ll have to wait a while to receive data from—or add data to—a client's application. In most cases, an API response takes multiple weeks to come back, which likely falls well below your clients’ expectations and needs.

In addition, 180 integrations typically scope a limited set of data, which prevents your clients from accessing a lot, if not all, of the data they’re interested in. And they don’t let you keep a log of the API calls and responses, which makes it difficult to diagnose and remediate integration issues on your clients’ behalf.

Merge provides the integrations your clients need and expect?

Merge, which is a single platform that lets you add an entire category of integrations to your product, neatly addresses all of the drawbacks of 180 integrations.?

All of our integrations are API-based, which ensures that they’re performant (you can sync data at least once a day, if not more often) and secure (your clients never have to share their login credentials with a random 3rd-party).?

Finally, your customer-facing team gets access to our full suite of integration management features , allowing them to help your clients identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any integration issues quickly and easily; and we perform integration maintenance work on your engineers’ behalf—all but ensuring that your integrations are reliable over time.

You can learn more about Merge by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts .