Financial API Ratings: Oct 5–12 | Railsbank is Speedy

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 move further into 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 5–12, 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	HitBTC	9.23
Fintech	PayPal (Sandbox)	9.43
Open Banking: PSD2	Nordea Bank	9.87
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.82
Open Banking UK: Production	Royal Bank of Scotland (Auth)	9.25
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Bank of Ireland	9.78

For our best financial API ratings, Nordea Bank in Open Banking – PSD2 takes the overall title this week with an excellent CASC score of 9.88, down from 9.87 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 5–12, 2020

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	FTX	213 ms
Fintech	Stripe	307 ms
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	102 ms
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	151 ms
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide (Auth)	149 ms
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	84 ms

HSBC in Open Banking – UK – Open Data takes the overall financial API ratings title with a median latency of 86 ms, down from 84 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 5–12, 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Binance	7.50
Fintech	Open Bank Project (Sandbox)	7.40
Open Banking: PSD2	DNB PSD2 (Sandbox)	6.61
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	OBIE Software Statement	6.03
Open Banking UK: Production	Vanquis (Auth)	6.41
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Nobody below 8.00!

OBIE Software Statement in the Open Banking – UK – Sandbox category takes the overall wooden spoon with a CASC score of 6.03.

Something of interest

Railsbank has the fastest median latency in Open Banking – PSD2. It has the second lowest CASC score because of having the worst pass rate and the second worst number of outliers. Some improvements are clearly called for, but it is a still a fast API. As we would expect for a fast API, the DNS Lookup Time is good. In 10 out of 22 cloud regions, it is 4 ms (plus one at 5 ms), which is pretty much as good as it can be. An excellent effort by Railsbank. They might not have many users calling them from Azure Oceania, but that’s the kind of anomaly that using an active API monitoring system can flag up. It might not be perceived as mission-critical, but it’s the kind of issue that should be identified and ironed out. Imagine if that were Azure Europe. See you again in a week as we look at the State of the financial APIs as we move into the second half of October. Also look out for our monthly report for October and, of course, our weekly and monthly reports on non-financial APIs.

Do more with API monitoring!

If you are new to APImetrics, sign up for a free trial so see how they could work for you with our free API set. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.

If you're new to API monitoring, you can learn about our comprehensive features for testing, monitoring, security and performance and sign up for a free trial account.