Fintech API Ratings Dec 7–14: Intuit Quickbooks

Something of interest

Fintech is a pretty competitive category. Everyone has a CASC score over 8.50, which isn’t a bad effort at all. 6 out of the 10 APIs have a CASC score of 9.00 or more, which is also pretty good.

Interestingly enough, Intuit QuickBooks props up the table with both its sandbox and production API, which have CASC scores only 0.01 apart. 8.51 is a perfectly respectable CASC score as far as it goes, although you can always do better.

Both APIs have 100% pass rates and only slight variation in the number of outliers. Comparing Process Time for the two APIs is educative.

The best and worst cloud and regions are the same for both the sandbox and production environment. This is exactly what you want if your sandbox is to accurately reflect the performance of the live system.

Interestingly, the live environment is actually faster than the sandbox for process time, although typically only by a few tens of milliseconds. Actively monitoring from your test and production systems lets you know that your sandbox is behaving just like your live environment, not just in terms of what is being returned by the endpoints, but in how the endpoints behave in terms of pass rate, latency and outliers. That way, using the sandbox really tells you how things are going to go with the production system, which is the whole point of the test environment.

Fintech API Ratings: Overall Performance

Week Ending 14 December 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	HitBTC	9.47
Fintech	Stripe	9.38
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	9.57
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.69
Open Banking UK: Production	Danske Bank	9.48
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Bank of Ireland	9.69

Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox) in Open Banking – UK – Production category and Bank of Ireland in the Open Banking – UK – Open Data category share the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.69. 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 9.38 or more, which is a very acceptable level of performance.

Fintech API Ratings: Latency

Week Ending 14 December 2020

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Kraken	222 ms
Fintech	Stripe	307 ms
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	107 ms
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Starling Bank (Sandbox)	134 ms
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide (Auth)	155 ms
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	80 ms

HSBC in Open Banking – UK – Open Data again takes the overall title again with a median latency of 80 ms, down from 81 ms 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 14 December 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Coinlore	6.95
Fintech	Nothing under 8.00!
Open Banking: PSD2	Nothing under 8.00!
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Barclays (Sandbox Auth)	6.99
Open Banking UK: Production	Creation Cards (Auth)	6.25
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	7.25

We have now split out Fintech APIs into separate weekly and monthly reports. This allows us to give you a more focused view on the different classes of APIs you care about. In particular, we have been seeing increased adoption of and interest in APIs in the financial sector as uptake of Open Banking accelerates and APImetrics has over the last few weeks been able to add many UK Open Banking APIs (we now monitor all nine of the CMA9 banks) to the ones we monitor and the performance of which can be seen at our API.expert site. See you again in a week as we plunge further into December. And don’t forget to look out for our November financial API report and the weekly and monthly non-financial ones.

Do more with Fintech API monitoring!

If you're new to API monitoring, you can learn about our comprehensive features for testing, monitoring, security and performance and sign up for a free trial account.