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 9.84, up from 9.82 last week.
- HSBC in the Open Banking API – UK – Open Data category takes the overall title again with a median latency of 91 ms, up from 88 ms last week.
- Barclays (Sandbox Auth) in the Open Banking API – UK – Sandbox category takes the overall wooden spoon this week with a CASC score of 4.98.
- We take a look at what Railsbank is doing right and whether there are any ways that might be able to improve even further.
Something of interest
Railsbank tops the competitive Open Banking API – PSD2 category this week with an exceptional CASC score of 9.66. It’s not surprising it is doing so well, it has a 100% pass rate, very few outliers, and is fast. But you never rest on your laurels. Continuous improvement must be the watchword. Are there any areas that Railsbank could look to improve? 
We see a big regional variation. Europe is by far the quickest region. Even North America is 400 ms or so slower. Oceania is a second slower than Europe. This might not matter so much to Railsbank because its users are mainly in Europe. But even if your users are physically in Europe, the app that they are calling your API from might not be hosted there. That’s why you need to be monitoring your APIs actively. You shouldn’t make assumptions about the performance that your users are experiencing. You need to measure it. 
Even within Europe, you might want to try and squeeze out those extra 32 ms of overall latency that Azure users are experiencing compared to IBM Cloud ones. 
Azure in Europe is slowest for both TCP Connection Time and Handshake Time. It’s not a lot, but every millisecond counts. Can you do something about it? And Europe overall is much better for TCP Connection Time and Handshake Time. Railsbank is probably hosted there! Perhaps this is just geography, but often configuration issues are the cause of differences in performance between regions. Railsbank is a very good API. Could it be a better by taking a close look at all its cloud connection configurations, in Europe and the rest of the world? 
Banking API Analysis: Overall Performance
Week Ending 22 March 2021
Category
Organization
CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
RadarRelay
9.27
Fintech
Square (Sandbox)