Fintech API Ratings Jan 4-11: Creation Cards

API Performance

We can’t believe it’s still the first half of January 2021. But don’t fear, API.expert is still on the case with our weekly Fintech API ratings.

For our Fintech API ratings, we look at over 100 APIs and pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for the service quality for an organization’s APIs in a particular Fintech API ratings category with our patented CASC score.

Something of interest

One of the things about APIs is that you can go from hero to a zero in a moment. And sometimes you can go from zero to hero.

Creation Cards, which has spent much of the last few months languishing at the bottom of the Open Banking – UK – Production category has suddenly leaped to the top of its Fintech API table.

Now, Open Banking – UK – Production is a large Fintech API category (40 APIs at the moment!) and it’s a pretty competitive one too. 29 out of 40 APIs make it into the Green Zone and 9 out of 40 have CASC scores over 9.00, so it’s no small task to top the category. Where have Creation Cards suddenly gone right?

They don’t have a 100% pass rate, but 99.95% is competitive compared to many of the other APIs in the category as is the percentage of outliers, but it is in median latency that Credit Cards wins out.

We can see that of the five endpoints being monitored, it is OAuth: Access Token: client_credentials that has been pulling down Creation Cards in precious weeks.

This has had a very slow CASC score (less than 2.00 at times), which has dragged down the overall ranking of the API. Previously, this endpoint was extremely slow and was generating a very large number of outliers.

The endpoint is still slow and has a large standard deviation, but has 100% pass rate and is only producing a relatively small number of outliers.

Three of the other endpoints have CASC scores over 9.00, so improving OAuth: Access Token: client_credentials further will help ensure that Creation Cards stays firmly in the Green Zone.

For calls with a latency close to the mean, Download Time is the rate-determining step, so it is the component that should be optimized to for maximum performance for this endpoint.

Fintech API Ratings: Overall Performance

Week Ending 11 January 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Coinpaprika	9.53
Fintech	PayPal (Sandbox)	9.30
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	9.51
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.29
Open Banking UK: Production	Creation Cards	9.32
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Bank of Ireland	9.72

Bank of Ireland in the Open Banking – UK – Open Data category takes the overall title again this week with a CASC score of 9.72, down from 9.72 last week. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional. Three of the six categories are headed by organizations with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week. Sustaining a CASC score of >9.25 over a period of several weeks is a good showing and congratulations to those organizations that achieved it. All categories are headed by an API with CASC score of 9.29 or more, which is a very acceptable level of performance.

Fintech API Ratings: Latency

Week Ending 11 January 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Kraken	220 ms
Fintech	Stripe	309 ms
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	103 ms
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Starling Bank (Sandbox)	141 ms
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide (Auth)	156 ms
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	86 ms

HSBC in Open Banking – UK – Open Data again takes the overall title again with a median latency of 86 ms, the same as last week. An important caveat: medians can be misleading! A Fintech API might have a fast median latency but produce many slow outliers. These won’t affect the median, but they mean that users can experience many calls that were unacceptably slow. So just being fast isn’t everything. You have to be reliable too if you want to have good APIs and get a high CASC score!

Fintech API Ratings: Worst Overall Quality

Week Ending 11 January 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	CryptoCompare	7.35
Fintech	Nobody under 8.00!
Open Banking: PSD2	Nobody under 8.00!
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Danske Bank (Sandbox)	5.57
Open Banking UK: Production	Danske Bank	5.96
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Halifax	7.07

Danske Bank (Sandbox) in the Open Banking – UK – Sandbox category takes the overall wooden spoon with a CASC score of 5.57. See you again in a week as we plunge further into 2021. Also don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for December and the weekly and monthly non-financial API reports. We will also be publishing special reports on the State of the APIs in the 2020, so that’s something else to look forward to!

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