API.expert Weekly Banking API Analysis: HitBTC Crypto

This Week’s Banking API Highlights

• Tide in the Open Banking API – UK – Production category, which was overall first last week with
• a CASC score of 9.84, this week shares the title with the Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox) in the Open Banking – UK –Sandbox category, both with a CASC score of 9.79.
• HSBC in the Open Banking API – UK – Open Data category takes the overall title again with a median latency of 87 ms, down from 91 ms last week.
• Barclays (Sandbox Auth) in the Open Banking API – UK – Sandbox category takes the overall wooden spoon again this week with a CASC score of 5.15, up from 4.98 last week.
• We look into what HitBTC is doing right and where it could improve.

Something of interest

HitBTC has been a reliable performer in the Cryptocurrency Exchanges category over the past year. It is a very solid banking API with a 100% pass rate and only 0.45% outliers. It’s slower than some of its competitors. That’s not always an issue, but is there anything could do to improve its speed?

HitBTC is a verry Euro-centric banking API. Any users from other regions of the world are going to experience a significantly degraded performance. And in a time-critical industry like cryptocurrency exchange where every millisecond counts, that isn’t something you want to be risking.

Even if your service is focused on Europe-based users, you can’t assume they are all accessing it from that continent. You need to be actively monitoring your APIs so that you know which regions are out of kilter and which latency components are adding lag to your calls.

This isn’t information you can get from within your own data center or from your gateway logs. You have to be actively monitoring from your banking API to obtain this intelligence.

As we can see, East Asia and particularly Oceania are very slow with a Total Time over 1000 milliseconds in both those regions. All Oceania locations are over a second slower than any European one. Interestingly, two of the South Asia locations are faster than any of the East Asia ones.

Generally, South Asia is slower than East Asia for most APIs because of a lower degree of connectivity and bandwidth into that region, an issue also often found with South America and Oceania.

Handshake Time is the rate-determining latency component. We can quickly identify anomalies.

Why is Google’s Handshake Time so much slower in South Asia than that of AWS and Azure? It is not something intrinsic about the region. All East Asia regions are slower than any South Asia ones. Is there anything that could be done to improve performance across the regions through optimizing network configuration?

By actively monitoring your banking APIs, you can see where the problems and then, when you have made any changes, see how things have got better. It’s by doing this kind of continuous improvement loop that your banking APIs will always be getting better in quality, staying ahead of the competition and delivering maximum value to your users.

Banking API Analysis: Overall Performance

Week Ending 29 March 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	HitBTC	9.28
Fintech	Square (Sandbox)	9.48
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	9.78
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.79
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide	9.79
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Bank of Ireland	9.76

Tide in the Open Banking API – UK – Production category, which was overall first last week a CASC score of 9.84, this week shares the title with the Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox) in the Open Banking API – UK –Sandbox category, both with a CASC score of 9.79.

Banking API Analysis: Latency

Week Ending 29 March 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Kraken	218 ms
Fintech	Stripe	331 ms
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	101 ms
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	147 ms
Open Banking UK: Production	Creation Cards	147 ms
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	87 ms

HSBC in the Open Banking API – UK – Open Data category takes the overall title again with a median latency of 87 ms, down from 91 ms last week.

Banking API Analysis: Worst Overall Quality

Week Ending 29 March 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	CoinMarketCap (Sandbox)	6.72
Fintech	Nobody under 8.00!
Open Banking: PSD2	Nobody under 8.00!
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox	Barclays (Sandbox Auth)	5.15
Open Banking UK: Production	B (bank)	5.99
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Nationwide Building Society (ATMs)	6.30

Barclays (Sandbox Auth) in the Open Banking API – UK – Sandbox category takes the overall wooden spoon again this week with a CASC score of 5.15, up from 4.98 last week. See you again in a week as we plunge out of March and into April. Don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for February (the April one will out next week) and the weekly and monthly non-banking API reports. We will also be publishing special reports on the State of the Banking APIs in the 2020, so that’s something else to look forward to!

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