This Week’s Banking API Highlights
- Tide in the Open Banking API – UK – Production category takes the overall title again this week with a CASC score of 9.85, up from 9.84 last week.
- HSBC in the Open Banking API – UK – Open Data category takes the overall title again with a median latency of 95 ms, up from 93 ms last week.
- Barclays (Sandbox Auth) in the Open Banking API – UK – Sandbox category takes the overall bottom spot again this week with a CASC score of 5.24, up from 4.51 last week.
- We take a good, hard look at what Railsbank is doing so right.
Something of interest
Railsbank in the Open Banking API – PSD2 category doesn’t quite claim the overall title this week, but with a CASC score of 9.82, it is not very far behind.
Tide is in the Open Banking API – UK – Production category. And Open Banking API – PSD2 is a competitive category, with no APIs outside the Green Zone.
Railsbank is close to the perfect banking API. It is fast, has hardly any outliers, and is always available. It’s what you want your banking API to look like.
Railsbank is a UK-based operation, and their performance is very much biased towards Europe, which is by far the fastest region. Even North America is ~4-5x slower than Europe.
This is one reason why you need to actively monitor your banking API – so that you understand how it is performing from the end user perspective.
Everything might seem to be fine for your users who are hosted in Europe, but it might that, in a globalized industry, that for, some reason, someone is invoking you from AWS US East (Northern Virginia). They are going to find a significantly worse experience than IBM Cloud in Europe.
The rate determining steps for Railsbank are TCP Connection Time and Handshake Time, so optimizing for regions outside Europe would only require focusing on these components.
TCP Connection Time is 91 ms slower from Azure North America than Google Europe and the Handshake Time is 180 ms slower. That’s a whole 271 ms of extra latency that you might want to get rid of if you can.
DNS Lookup Time, Upload Time, Process Time and Download Time are all very short from all regions, so if Railsbank wants to improve its performance in regions outside Europe, it has a very firm basis and a first-class banking API to do so.
Banking API Analysis: Overall Performance
Week Ending 19 April 2021
|
Category |
Organization |
CASC score
|
|
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
|
Gemini |
9.17 |
|
Fintech |
Square (Sandbox) |
9.48 |
|
Open Banking: PSD2
|
Railsbank |
9.82 |
|
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox
|
Lloyds Banking (Sandbox Auth) |
9.70 |
|
Open Banking UK: Production
|
Tide |
9.85 |
|
Open Banking UK: Open Data
|
Bank of Ireland |
9.66 |
Banking API Analysis: Latency
Week Ending 19 April 2021
|
Category |
Organization |
Median Latency
|
|
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
|
FTX |
247 ms |
|
Fintech |
Stripe |
327 ms |
|
Open Banking: PSD2
|
Railsbank |
100 ms |
|
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox
|
Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox) |
151 ms |
|
Open Banking UK: Production
|
Creation Cards |
149 ms |
|
Open Banking UK: Open Data
|
HSBC |
95 ms |
Banking API Analysis: Worst Overall Quality
Week Ending 19 April 2021
|
Category |
Organization |
CASC score
|
|
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
|
Coinlore |
6.82 |
|
Fintech |
TransferWise (Sandbox)
|
7.69 |
|
Open Banking: PSD2
|
Nobody under 8.00! |
|
|
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox
|
Barclays (Sandbox) |
5.24 |
|
Open Banking UK: Production
|
Yorkshire Building Society |
6.93 |
|
Open Banking UK: Open Data
|
HSBC |
6.87 |
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.
