Monthly Financial API Ratings, Sept 2020

So, September was apparently only a month long – sounds fake, but OK – and we’re ready to give you the monthly financial API ratings. We’ve now split out financial API ratings and the non-financial API ratings 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 a many UK Open Banking APIs to the ones we monitor and the performance of which can be seen at our API.expert (http://api.expert) site. Now, onto what the past week tells us about the state of the world of financial API ratings as we move further into October 2020.

API Performance Headlines

To compile our financial API ratings, we look at more than 200 APIs. Then we pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for financial API quality in a particular category. We do see that certain providers consistently vie for top spot in their financial API ratings category. Read on to learn more!

Top Financial API Ratings – CASC Score

Oct 5–12, 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Coinpaprika	9.03
Fintech	Stripe	9.36
Open Banking: PSD2	Nordea Bank	9.85
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.77
Open Banking UK: Production	Royal Bank of Scotland (Auth)	8.92
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Bank of Ireland	9.74

Nordea Bank in Open Banking – PSD2 takes the overall title this month with an excellent CASC score of 9.88. 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 organization with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this month. 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 but two categories is headed by an API with CASC score of 9.25, which is an acceptable level of performance.

Top Financial API Ratings – Latency

September, 2020

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Coinbase	123 ms
Fintech	Stripe	301 ms
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	96 ms
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	147 ms
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide (Auth)	148 ms
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	80 ms

HSBC in Open Banking – UK – Open Data takes the overall title with a median latency of 80 ms. An important caveat: medians can be misleading! An 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!

Worst Financial API Rating Overall

September, 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Oasis Dex	5.18
Fintech	Nobody below 8.00!
Open Banking: PSD2	Nobody below 8.00!
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Barclays (Sandbox Auth)	1.36
Open Banking UK: Production	Barclays (Auth)	3.61
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Halifax	7.59

Barclays (Auth) in the Open Banking– UK – Sandbox category takes the overall wooden spoon with a CASC score of 6.15.

Something of interest

APImetrics has recently begun monitoring a number of APIs in the Open Banking – UK – Production category. We are planning to add more in the near future. What’s good about these APIs is that they allow us to compare directly the performance of different banks with APIs that perform the same tasks.

As you can see there was a pretty wide range in quality in September with CASC scores varying from 8.92 to 3.61, which is deep in the Red Zone. Only 2 out of 28 APIs are in the Red Zone, 6 in the Amber Zone and 20 in the Green, although not above 9.00. If you have a look at a recent financial APIs weekly report, you will see that there are no APIs in the Red Zone in this category and some with CASC scores above 9.00, but it is more difficult to sustain a good API for a month than a week as a bad day or two can ruin not one week’s CASC score, but a whole’s months. Tide (Auth) has a latency of 148 ms in contrast with Creation Card (Auth) with a latency of 1378 ms, nearly an order of magnitude higher.

Tide is quick, but interesting its DNS Lookup Time is very slow. This should, typically, be about 12 ms. Here we see that it is between 29 ms and 125 ms. Something is definitely up here. The Tide DevOps team need to have a look at their DNS. This is why you need to actively monitor your APIs. Tide (Auth) is a fast API, but it could be even faster if the issue with DNS were to be resolved. This is the kind of problem that is difficult to observe from inside a corporate network. That’s why you need to be monitoring from outside so that you see what your end users see. See you again in a month as we look at the State of the financial APIs in October. Also look out for our weekly reports on financial APIs and our weekly and monthly reports on non-financial ones.

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Paul Cray

Machine Learning Specialist at APImetrics.

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Monthly Financial API Ratings, Sept 2020

API Performance Headlines

Top Financial API Ratings – CASC Score

Oct 5–12, 2020

Top Financial API Ratings – Latency

September, 2020

Worst Financial API Rating Overall

September, 2020

Something of interest

Do more with API monitoring!

Paul Cray

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