We have now split out Open banking and other financial APIs we rate into separate weekly and monthly reports. This allows us to give you a more focused view of the APIs you care about.
In particular, we’ve seen increased adoption of and interest in APIs in the financial sector as the uptake of Open Banking accelerates. At APImetrics over the last few weeks, we’ve been able to add many UK Open Banking APIs to the ones we monitor and the performance of which can be seen at our API.expert site.
Now, onto what the past week tells us about the state of the world of Open Banking and financial APIs as we go into November 2020.
API Performance Headlines: CASC
We look at hundreds of API endpoints and pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for the service quality for an organization’s APIs in a particular category.
Top Open Banking & Finance API Ratings
Week Ending 3 November 2020
Category |
Organization |
CASC score
|
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
|
HitBTC |
9.53 |
Fintech |
Stripe |
9.30 |
Open Banking: PSD2
|
ABN AMRO Bank (Sandbox) |
9.51 |
Open Banking UK: Sandbox
|
Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox) |
9.57 |
Open Banking UK: Production
|
Danske Bank |
9.34 |
Open Banking UK: Open Data
|
Bank of Ireland |
9.71 |
Top Open Banking & Finance API Ratings: Latency
Week Ending 3 November 2020
Category |
Organization |
Median Latency
|
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
|
FTX |
219 ms |
Fintech |
Stripe |
304 ms |
Open Banking: PSD2
|
Railsbank |
111 ms |
Open Banking UK: Sandbox
|
Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox) |
137 ms |
Open Banking UK: Production
|
Tide (Auth) |
148 ms |
Open Banking UK: Open Data
|
HSBC |
87 ms |
Worst quality across all categories
Week Ending 3 November 2020
Category |
Organization |
CASC score
|
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
|
Bancor Network |
7.76 |
Fintech |
Intuit Quickbooks (Sandbox)
|
7.95 |
Open Banking: PSD2
|
Railsbank |
7.41 |
Open Banking UK: Sandbox
|
Danske Bank (Sandbox) |
4.23 |
Open Banking UK: Production
|
Creation Cards (Auth) |
6.10 |
Open Banking UK: Open Data
|
HSBC |
7.59 |
Something of interest
Open Banking sandboxes are a controversial topic. Any good sandbox must replicate the production environment as closely as possible. But replicating the production environment is no easy task and despite being obligated to provide a sandbox by the regulator banks have been known to cheat and use a bank in a box (you can get these from a number of providers) that doesn’t behave anything like the live bank. But we do see big variations in the quality of the sandboxes. Three manage to a CASC score of over 9.00, two are in the Amber Zone and one – Danske Bank (Sandbox) is firmly in the Red Zone and took the Wooden Spoon this week. We don’t have to look far as to why it was struggling. It is reasonably fast, but it had a lot of failures and a lot of outliers. But we are seeing persistent 500s Internal Server Error (with the helpful error message “Internal Server Error” (and the occasional 401) on one of the endpoints. The lesson here, of course, is to monitor your sandbox and just any other part of your critical infrastructure because the sandbox is part of your critical infrastructure. If you are not monitoring, you are not managing. Treat your sandbox just like your production environment, both in the way it works and the way it is monitored. See you again in a week as dive deeper in November. And don’t forget to look out for October financial API report coming soon and the weekly and monthly non-financial ones.Do more with finance API monitoring!
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