This Week’s Banking API Highlights
- Tide in the Open Banking API – UK – Production category takes the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.82.
- HSBC in the Open Banking API – UK – Open Data category takes the overall title again with a median latency of 88 ms, the same as last week.
- Halifax in the Open Banking API – UK – Open Data category takes the overall wooden spoon this week with a CASC score of 4.59.
- We look at exactly what went wrong with the three Lloyds Group APIs in the Open Banking API – UK – Open Data category last week.
Something of interest
The three Lloyds Group APIs in the Open Banking – UK – Open Data category had a bad week last week. All three APIs had CASC scores of less than 5.00, placing them firmly in the Red Zone. Only two other APIs out of 17 are in the Amber Zone. So the Lloyds Group API really were struggling compared to their peers. What went wrong? 
Remember that the Open Data APIs are directly comparable in terms of functionality and thus there is really no reason for significant differences in performance between them. Yet the Lloyds Group are three of the four slowest in the category and Halifax is by far the slowest. But it is in the pass rate and outliers that the three APIs are underperforming. 
The Lloyds Get ATMs V2.2 endpoint is typical of the Lloyds Group endpoints this week. It has a low pass rate, a lot of outliers and is very slow. 
The big problem is an outage on Saturday, 13 March 2021 from about 13:41 UTC, when we observed a HTTP 502 Bad Gateway followed by many HTTP 404 Not Found through to 19:52 UTC when the endpoint started passing again. Note that this was not a continuous outage. We saw passes between 16:28 UTC and 16:59 UTC, which was followed by a 502 and then 404s. We also saw one 503 (Service Unavailable). Note that we also observed a cluster of 404s, 200 Slow Failures and incomplete (timed-out) calls later in the evening of 13 March between 22:24 UTC and 23:36 UTC. These can be on the chart above. We have also this week seen a cluster 404s and 502s on 16 March, so this is an ongoing issue, suggesting that the original outage wasn’t a planned outage. The three Lloyds Group API has been having sustained issues over the last few days. This is why you need to be actively monitoring your APIs, so that you know both if there are problems with your API right now, but also if there have been problems that spontaneously resolved themselves. Those kinds of problems can indicate undiagnosed bugs and they can come back to bite you when you least expect and, inevitably, when they will be most costly to you.
Banking API Analysis: Overall Performance
Week Ending 15 March 2021
Category
Organization
CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
RadarRelay
9.35
Fintech
Square (Sandbox)