Something of interest
In the Fintech API November monthly report, we discuss HSBC, which is perennially fast and perennially languishes towards or at the bottom of the Open Banking – UK – Open Data category. This is because HSBC caches the result with the consequence that you get a lot of outliers when the cache refreshes because of the slowness of pulling the result from the backend. It’s interesting to see how HSBC compares to a performant Fintech API like this week’s category topper, First Trust Bank. One of the great things about the Open Banking – UK – Open Data category is that it is an exact comparison as the endpoints of the various banks do precisely the same things. 
This is HSBC Get FCA Service Metrics BCA V1.0 latency graph, which we can see is quite choppy with lots of significantly slower calls. We can compare this with First Trust Get FCA Service Metrics BCA V1.0. 
Here we see a much more consistent service with just variation around a mean of about 300 ms. Yes, First Trust is slower than HSBC, but it is also much more performant. If we had to guess here, we would suggest that the HSBC request is cached, with each new call taking several seconds and being stored. That is not necessarily a bad thing to do with an API which does not change frequently, and is common where a large and complex back end process is involved. However, when we look at the returned content size, the HSBC content is approximately 75% the size of the First Trust content, suggesting an overall better backend architecture supporting this API. And that’s why First Trust has a CASC score of 9.67. With APIs, consistency is good. You never want to surprise your end-users!
Fintech API Ratings: Overall Performance
Week Ending 7 December 2020
Category
Organization
CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
Coinpaprika
9.53
Fintech
Stripe