Financial API Ratings: Oct 12–19 | Oh Coinlore!

We’ve now split out financial API ratings and the non-financial API ratings into separate weekly and monthly reports. This allows us to give you a more focused view on the different classes of APIs you care about.
In particular, we have been seeing increased adoption of and interest in APIs in the financial sector as uptake of Open Banking accelerates and APImetrics has over the last few weeks been able to add a many UK Open Banking APIs to the ones we monitor and the performance of which can be seen at our API.expert (http://api.expert) site.
Now, onto what the past week tells us about the state of the world of financial API ratings as we… good lord we are still in October 2020.

API Performance Headlines

To compile our financial API ratings, we look at more than 200 APIs. Then we pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for financial API quality in a particular category.
We do see that certain providers consistently vie for top spot in their financial API ratings category.

Top Financial API Ratings – CASC Score

Oct 12–19, 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Coinpaprika	9.48
Fintech	Stripe	9.43
Open Banking: PSD2	Nordea Bank	9.85
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.82
Open Banking UK: Production	Royal Bank of Scotland	9.24
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Bank of Ireland	9.80

Nordea Bank in Open Banking – PSD2 takes the overall title again this week with a first rate CASC score of 9.85, down from 9.88 last week. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional. Three of the six categories are headed by organization with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week. Sustaining a CASC score of >9.25 over a period of several weeks is a good showing and congratulations to those organizations that achieved it. All but one category is headed by an API with CASC score of 9.25, which is an acceptable level of performance.

Top Financial API Ratings - Latency

Oct 12–19, 2020

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Kraken	225 ms
Fintech	Stripe	306 ms
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	97 ms
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	151 ms
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide (Auth)	161 ms
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	93 ms

HSBC in Open Banking – UK – Open Data takes the overall title again with a median latency of 93 ms, up from 86 ms last week. An important caveat: medians can be misleading! An API might have a fast median latency but produce many slow outliers. These won’t affect the median, but they mean that users can experience many calls that were unacceptably slow. So just being fast isn’t everything. You have to be reliable too if you want to have good APIs and get a high CASC score!

Worst Financial API Rating Overall

Oct 12–19, 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Coinlorre	5.07
Fintech	Open Bank Project (Sandbox)	7.48
Open Banking: PSD2	Nobody below 8.00!
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Barclays (Sandbox Auth)	7.04
Open Banking UK: Production	Barclays (Auth)	6.75
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Nobody below 8.00!

Coinlore in the Cryptocurrency Exchange category takes the overall wooden spoon with a CASC score of 5.07, placing it firmly in the Red Zone.

Something of interest

Coinlore takes the overall Wooden Spoon this week with a CASC score of 5.07. It’s got the lowest pass rate and the most outliers and is third slowest in its category. The standard deviation of the latency also affects the CASC score. A good API should have a low standard deviation, which indicates consistent performance. We are getting very big variations in total time between regions. Coinlore is probably hosted in North America and gets a quick response in Europe, but is getting killed across other regions especially South Asia. For a cryptocurrency API, for which every millisecond counts, you really want to offer all of your users as similar a service as possible. It’s through using an active API performance and quality monitoring system that you can see that your South Asian customers having been experiencing a 900 ms lag compared to your North American ones. That’s an eternity. And you might not even know that it is occurring until your customers abandon you for someone reliably quicker. See you again in a week as we look at the State of the financial APIs as we steam towards the end of October. Also look out for our monthly report for September and, of course, our weekly and monthly reports on non-financial APIs.

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