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 9.83 last week.
- HSBC in the Open Banking API – UK – Open Data category takes the overall title again with a median latency of 97 ms, up from 95 ms last week.
- RadarRelay in the Cryptocurrency Exchanges API category takes the overall bottom spot again this week with a CASC score of 4.23.
- We take a look at two excellent Open Banking APIs and ask whether there is anything they can do better.
Something of interest
Tide takes the overall title again this week with a superb CASC score of 9.84. It’s a near-perfect API with 100% availability, almost no outliers, and pretty fast. NatWest is a bit further behind. It’s not always available has a lot more outliers and is slower, but it still has a very good CASC score of 9.44. Is there anything other banking APIs can do to improve? 
DNS Lookup Time for banking APIs is an obvious area of focus for Tide. It should be 4 ms everywhere, so this needs looking at. 
NatWest is 4 ms everywhere. This is why you need to be actively monitoring your APIs. Even if you have a good banking API, your competitor might be beating you one particular area where you know you can improve. 
TCP Connection Time is fast for the Tide banking API. Perhaps they should do better for Google and IBM Cloud, but we are only talking a few milliseconds. 
NatWest does slightly better here, especially with Google. So, again, that’s something Tide could improve. 
Handshake Time is a source of latency for Tide. Google and IBM Cloud are, in particular, quite a lot slower than Azure. Could something be done there? 
NatWest definitely beats out Tide with this component, again, especially with Google. So there’s definitely things Tide banking APIs could do. 
And it’s with Process Time that the Tide banking API really shines. And there’s not a lot of variation between clouds. This is all want is happening in the Tide data center. 
There’s even less variation between clouds for NatWest, but there’s over a 100 ms of extra latency for this component. But Tide has set the benchmark for Process Time. By monitoring your banking APIs and competitors, you can see directly within Open Banking APIs how you compare. There’s nowhere to hide! And it’s clear where Tide and NatWest need to focus their efforts to shave off those milliseconds. 
Banking API Analysis: Overall Performance
Week Ending 10 May 2021
Category
Organization
CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
CoinMarketCcap (Sandbox)
9.42
Fintech
Square (Sandbox)