API red flags your procurement team missed (and why you're stuck with terrible vendor integrations)

I spend a lot of time helping companies evaluate KYB and AML vendors. The pattern is always the same: procurement runs a thorough commercial evaluation, compliance signs off on the regulatory requirements, and then three months later the engineering team is pulling their hair out trying to integrate with an API that was clearly designed by someone who has never written production code. Here's the thing. Procurement teams are great at comparing feature lists and commercial terms. They are terrible at evaluating APIs. And since you are the one who has to live with their decision for the next three years, you need to know what questions they are not asking. The demo trap Vendor demos are optimised for non-technical buyers. They show polished UIs, talk about "seamless integrations" (sorry, had to use it ironically), and wave around Postman collections like they prove something meaningful about production readiness. What they do not show you is what happens when their API returns a 500 erro