What's in a name? Microservices are fine-grained and operate on a single bounded context, where applications typically have coarser-grained interfaces and involve multiple contexts. I suppose if your pet insurance system were only to provide a constrained list of values of pet insurance products, and provide an interface to associate them with a user ID from the HR monolith, then it's a microservice. (Of course, you've pushed off the integration with the _actual_ pet insurance app somewhere else, but that might be OK.)

"APIs" are an enterprise integration technique [1]. There's nothing inherently creaky or frameworkey about them.

[1] http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/patterns/messag...