API.expert Weekly Banking API Analysis: UK Production

This Week’s Highlights

• Tide in the Open Banking API – UK – Production category takes the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.86.
• HSBC in the Open Banking API – UK – Open Data category takes the overall title again with a median latency of 88 ms, up from 87 ms last week.
• Barclays (Sandbox Auth) in the Open Banking API – UK – Sandbox category is the loser again this week with a CASC score of 5.01, down from 5.15 last week.
• We examine what mid-table respectability looks like in the Open Banking API – UK – Production category.

Something of interest

Open Banking API – UK – Production is a big category. We often look at the top or bottom performers. But what about those in the middle? How are they doing?

8.97 is a pretty good CASC score for HSBC Personal at No. 16 and Cumberland Building Society is respectable enough at No. 25 with a CASC score of 8.57, even if it could do with reducing its outliers.

HSBC Business is pretty much smack in the middle. It’s got the same outlier percentage as its sister brand, a better pass rate, but is slightly slower.

Total Time is the 600-millisecond range from all clouds with only a 47 ms variation between fastest and slowest. That’s not bad. Are there any areas of possible improvement?

DNS Lookup Time is absolutely bang on the money. 4 ms from all clouds, which is exactly as it should be. No improvements needed there. Of course, if you are not actively monitoring your API, you won’t know this.

This is why you need to be actively monitoring your API, so that you do know that you do have the optimal DNS performance for all your users (and in Open Banking you definitely can’t assume they all come from the same cloud).

And you all know when you don’t, so that you can do something about it.

TCP Connection Time is noticeably slower from Google and IBM Cloud than AWS and Azure, but only by 10 ms or so.

That’s not a lot, but you still want to squeeze out every millisecond of performance you can.

Handshake Time is also slower from Google and IBM Cloud, this time by 24 to 34 ms. Those tens of milliseconds can start adding up.

It’s the Process Time that is rate-determining step, but here TCP Connection Time Google and IBM Cloud are faster by between 25 and 74 ms. Thus overall the difference between gets evened out a bit.

It’s only by monitoring banking APIs that you know that you have a problem cloud and can proactively do something about it before it affects your users.

But overall, HSBC Business is pretty good across the clouds, although it could always look to see if speed things up for all clouds in terms of Process Time.

Banking API Analysis: Overall Performance

Week Ending 5 April 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	RadarRelay	9.44
Fintech	Square (Sandbox)	9.56
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	9.79
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.77
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide	9.86
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Bank of Ireland	9.80

Tide in the Open Banking API – UK – Production category takes the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.86. It shared it with a CASC score of 9.79 last week.

Banking API Analysis: Latency

Week Ending 5 April 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Kraken	219 ms
Fintech	Stripe	333 ms
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	102 ms
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	146 ms
Open Banking UK: Production	Creation Cards	149 ms
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	88 ms

HSBC in the Open Banking API – UK – Open Data category takes the overall title again with a median latency of 88 ms, up from 87 ms last week.

Banking API Analysis: Worst Overall Quality

Week Ending 5 April 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Bithumb	7.40
Fintech	Open Bank Project (Sandbox)	7.95
Open Banking: PSD2	Nobody under 8.00!
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox	Barclays (Sandbox Auth)	5.01
Open Banking UK: Production	B (bank)	5.92
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Halifax	6.91

Barclays (Sandbox Auth) in the Open Banking API – UK – Sandbox category takes the overall wooden spoon again this week with a CASC score of 5.01, down from 5.15 last week. See you again in a week as we steam further into April. (Will it be the cruelest month this year?) Also don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for March 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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