API Ratings | Sept 21-28, 2020: Halifax is Super Slow

September has just flown right on by, and that time of the week has already arrived again for us to look at some key API ratings over the past seven days.
We recently launched API.expert as a simple way to provide everybody with insights into the API economay and the leading API ratings in different categories in particular.
The basic service is free and will remain free. But other, related API ratings services will be built on top of it, including your very own API.expert dashboards if you want them!

Each week, month, and year we’ll look at API ratings in a variety of sectors for their quality CASC score using our patented system (US Patent 10,644,962, if you fancy a little light bedtime reading) that allows you to see the API ratings and compare them to other ones, as well as factors like uptime and availability.

If something is missing in our API ratings that you think should be here, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

Now, onto what the past week tells us about the state of API ratings during this insane week of an unending year.

API Performance Headlines

To compile our API ratings, we look at more than 200 APIs. Then we pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for API quality in a particular category.

We do see that certain providers consistently vie for top spot in their API ratings category, including GitHub and Google. Others do less well, such as Halifax and the NHS.

Top API Ratings – CASC Score

Sept 21-28, 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Github	9.77
COVID-19	ECDC (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control)	9.46
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	HitBTC	9.28
Fintech	Stripe	9.42
Search	Google	9.43
Social Networks	Twitter	9.69
Open Banking - PSD2	Nordea Bank	9.88
Open Banking - UK Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.77
Open Banking - UK Production	Bank of Ireland	8.87
Open Banking - UK Open Data	Allied Irish Bank (GB)	9.81
UK Government	Poolice.UK	9.86
US Government	Department of Justice	9.84

Five changes this week to top performers. Nordea retains the overall title for the private sector with a CASC score of 9.88, down very slightly from 9.89 last week. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional for an API rating. Six of the eleven categories are headed by organization with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week, the same as last week. Sustaining a CASC score of >9.25 over a period of several weeks is a good showing for API ratings. Congrats to those organizations that achieved it. All API rating categories but one are headed by an API with CASC score of 9.20, which is an acceptable level of performance.

Top API Ratings - Latency

Sept 21-28, 2020

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Office	225 ms
COVID-19	CDC Tools	159 ms
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	FTX	222 ms
Fintech	Stripe	299 ms
Search	Facebook	327 ms
Social Networks	Google	58 ms
Open Banking - PSD2	Railsbank	95 ms
Open Banking - UK Sandbox	Tide (Auth)	145 ms
Open Banking - UK Production	Cashplus	137 ms
Open Banking - UK Open Data	HSBC	83 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	89 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	53 ms

A stable week with just one change: Tide (Auth) replacing Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox) in Open Banking – UK – Production. Department of Justice takes the overall title again with a median latency of 53 ms, up from 51 ms last week. An important caveat for these API ratings: 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! As so often, FTX tops the Cryptocurrency Exchange category by median latency. This week they are up to ninth out of 18 overall with a CASC score of 8.55, placing them solidly in the Green Zone.

Worst API Rating Overall

Sept 21-28, 2020

Category	Organization	CASC Score
Corporate Infrastructure	Cisco Spark	7.99
COVID-19	Coronavirus Data API (thevirustracker.com)	5.13
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Poloniex	6.62
Fintech	OBIE Software Statement (Sandbox)	7.85
Search	Nobody below 8.00!
Social Networks	Nobody below 8.00!
Open Banking - PSD2	Nobody below 8.00!
Open Banking - UK Sandbox	Barclays (Sandbox Auth)	2.37
Open Banking - UK Production	Barclays (Auth)	3.36
Open Banking - UK Open Data	Halifax	7.66
UK Government	NHS	6.96
US Government	Nobody below 8.00!

Six changes in bottom performer this week with Barclays in the Open Banking – UK – Sandbox category taking the loser trophy.

Something of interest

As you can see in our revised API ratings, APImetrics has recently been able to start monitoring not just the sandbox environments of some of the banks in the UK that are offering open banking, but also certain APIs in the production environments too. Generally, we separate the functionality the bank provides into an auth piece and a operational piece for convenience. It is possible and useful to test the auth piece without having credentials to test the operational piece. Of the 18 brands, we monitor 16 are in the Green Zone and 14 have CASC scores above 9.20. In the past, we have seen some pretty erratic behavior in this category, but things have largely sorted themselves out these days. But interestingly, three of the bottom four are Lloyds Group brands. The odd one out is HSBC, which is superfast, but erratic. The Lloyds Group brands are pretty slow. Now, Santander is slower than Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Bank, but Santander is more reliable. Only Barclays of non-Northern Ireland banks has fewer outliers. The Lloyds Group banks are get marked down for being pretty slow, not being wholly reliable in terms of availability and having quite a lot of outliers. But Halifax is superslow, more than twice as slow as both Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Bank, and it has a lot of outliers. This seems odd as we might expect that Halifax uses the same infrastructure as the other two. The Get Branches endpoint is really pulling down the Lloyds Group performance overall. And it has been getting worse in recent weeks. Pulling the list of branches out of a back-end database is a slow business at the moment in Lloyds Group. Even if they don’t want to provide a convenient cache of the data (yes, branches might close every week, but not every 5 minutes), there are surely ways of optimizing the performance on the backend to get the data more quickly? See you again in a week as we look at the State of the APIs at the end of September and beginning of October We will also be publishing the monthly report for October next month.

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