The story of our previous monthly surveys of the UK CMA9 Open Banking public APIs has been that roughly 30% of the APIs have fallen below an acceptable score of 800 or more.
While things have improved in June, confirming our suspicions that many of the banks took advantage of the multiple holidays during May to make changes, we still observe that 28% of the APIs we monitor are performing below a ‘good’ score as determined by our CASC scoring system.
This is strongly tied to a small number of the institutions involved. Generally speaking, if some of a bank’s APIs perform well, ALL APIs perform well. If there is bad performance, then it affects all of them.
There are some exceptions to the CMA9 rule
Bank of Scotland, HSBC and Lloyds have a variety of scores bridging 800, while other poor performers are below that and the rest maintain scores in the 900s.
As we have also discussed, given that the APIs are essentially doing exactly the same things, in the same way, it is interesting that there is as much diversity in performance.
Across all Banks the Get Personal Current Accounts API is the worst performing with low scores, relatively speaking for all banks. When we dig into the data, the most interesting results come from looking at the results with and without networking effects taken into consideration.
When we include DNS and connection times the difference between best and worst performance can be measured in seconds, when we exclude that the difference drops to about half a second – however – in the world of APIs even half a second is an eternity.
Over the next few weeks we will start to publish the achieved Service Levels across all the UK CMA9 APIs and indicate how often these are met or missed as well as details on the comparative performance of the different steps of the API call transaction; look up, connection, upload, download and processing time.
As always, if you’d like a consultation on how we can help measure your performance on Open Banking and Read/Write APIs, please don’t hesitate to contact us.