Something of Interest
NatWest Groups' two sets of two Fintech APIs are usually pretty performant, but we have seen a definite dip in the performance of the non-Auth APIs in the last week. The Auth APIs held up at 5th (NatWest Auth) and 8th (RBS Auth) out 41 APIs, NatWest non-Auth doesn’t hold up too badly at 10th, but RBS non-Auth is off pace at 22nd. 
Now, these Fintech APIs should behave pretty much identically because they are using the same infrastructure. We can see that the median latencies are virtually the same. 
There is hardly any difference between the median latencies from different clouds. RBS has a slightly higher percentage of outliers, but the main difference is the pass rate with RBS having a 99.79% pass rate to NatWest’s 99.89%. That’s what has pushed down RBS’s CASC score. And we see that the warnings and errors that RBS and NatWest produce are the same. We see a mix of 400 (Bad Request), 401 (Unauthorized), 500 (Internal Server Error) and 503 (Service Unavailable) HTTP status codes. All of these issues appear to be related to the Ping Identity system rather than to the open core banking functions. So, the auth endpoints in the Auth APIs are working perfectly or at least always pass, but problems with authentication and tokens arise with the production endpoints. Why there are more for RBS than NatWest ones is unclear; it might just be a statistical fluctuation rather than anything truly fundamental. But whatever the case, this is something for NatWest to have a good, hard look at. And it is why you need to be actively monitoring your Fintech APIs. These kinds of intermittent issues might not be quite as bowel clenching as a full outage, but they still affect both user experience and the performance reported to the regulator. You need to know about them as soon as they happen and get to the bottom of what is causing them before they start having consequences.
Fintech API Ratings: Overall Performance
Week Ending 23 November 2020
Category
Organization
CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
Gemini
9.44
Fintech
Stripe