HSBC again is the fastest Banking API even as it languishes in the Amber Zone. The next five fastest Banking APIs are all NatWest Group brands, but Royal Bank of Scotland come somewhat further down the table. This isn’t necessarily something surprising. RBS and, especially, NatWest return a much longer list of ATMs and branches than Coutts (and Esme Loans doesn’t even have any). 
Coutts is a fast Banking API, but its DNS Lookup Time is affecting its performance especially from Azure. Even 28-29 ms is a very high fraction of the overall latency for a fast API. 
Matters are even worse at Esme Loans, where only AWS has a DNS Lookup Time less than 60-61 ms. NatWest Group really does need to look into optimizing DNS for their APIs. That’s why you need to actively monitor your APIs: just because a Banking API seems fast doesn’t mean that it is not underperforming. DNS Lookup Time should never be as high as 60-61 ms. 
NatWest itself shows another pattern. It is slowest from the IBM Cloud for DNS Lookup Time and has a time of 28 ms from the other clouds. Only AWS is always fast. This might suggest that it is the cloud for which performance has been optimized. But it is a mistake to just optimize for a single cloud, even the most popular one. Not everyone might be calling your Banking API from that cloud. 
Santander is not a fast Banking API, but it puts NatWest Group to shame when it comes to DNS Lookup Time. DNS lookup Time should never be more than 12 ms and ideally should be 4 ms (see our forthcoming whitepaper on network performance in 2019-20). Santander manages this. And there is no reason why NatWest Group shouldn’t. By tuning the DNS Lookup Time, they could shave off tens of milliseconds off overall latency and potentially knock HSBC off the top spot. For these Open Data, that might not seem worth it putting too much more effort into optimizing already performant APIS. But with more mission critical ones – when every millisecond counts – you can’t afford to have DNS Lookup Time dragging down your quality for no good reason when your competitors are nailing it. Get it sorted out! APImetrics can help. 
Banking API Analysis: Overall Performance
Week Ending 1 March 2021
Category
Organization
CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
LATOKEN
9.30
Fintech
Stripe