Something of interest
In Open Banking – UK – Production API metrics category, Nationwide has a degree of middle table respectability coming in at 19 out of 40 with a Green Zone CASC score of 8.36 and a 100% pass rate. It could do better, but it’s doing OK. But, as we discussed last week, in Open Banking – UK – Sandbox, Nationwide has been taking the overall wooden spoon amongst financial APIs. And here’s the thing: it’s the same four endpoints in both cases. 
Everything looks fine for the production endpoints. OAuth Access Token client_credentials could do with being perked up a bit, but the pass rates (100%) and outlier percentages are fine as far as API metrics are concerned. 
The sandbox endpoints don’t quite 100%, but it is the median latency and outlier percentage that is absolutely killing these API metrics endpoints. And this has been going on now for several weeks. This does look as though not enough attention is being paid to the sandbox. Now, people might say “It’s only a sandbox” or “Nobody uses it” or “It’s just an off-the-shelf bank-in-a-box." But none of that matters. A sandbox should be easier than a production environment. If all your endpoints in the sandbox have had median latency of about 30 s for several weeks, something is seriously amiss. The sandbox’s performance should, ideally, be as close as possible to that of the production environment not just in what the endpoints return, but also in how quickly and reliably they do it. It’s certainly about time that a good hard look was taken at the Nationwide sandbox and just what is going on with those latencies. Because if they can do it for production – and they can – Nationwide can do it for the sandbox.
Fintech API Metrics: Overall Performance
Week Ending 1 February 2021
Category
Organization
CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
RadarRelay
9.38
Fintech
Stripe