Fintech API Metrics Weekly Report: Royal Bank of Scotland Wins!

Something of interest

The Open Banking – UK – Production Fintech API metrics category is a big category. But let’s look at the Top Ten, but by outliers, not by CASC score.

Now, what’s interesting is that the top three Fintech APIs by outliers are also the top three Fintech APIs by CASC score. You want to have a consistent service because that’s what your users want and you don’t want to have many outliers because they will affect user experience negatively, for instance, causing apps to time out.

Tide takes the Fintech API title this week, but a photo finish as less 0.01 of a CASC score point separates it from Danske Bank. Both Tide and Danske Bank have a very low percentage of outliers at 0.30% and 0.37% and Tide (Auth) comes in third on both CASC score and outliers with an outlier percentage of 0.55%. We then see a leap to 1.05% outliers for fourth place for OBIE Directory (Production Auth), so it is noteworthy that only Tide and Danske Bank have been able to keep the outlier percentage below 1% this week.

This shows how hard it is to do that and why it is vital to actively monitor from APIs so that you know exactly how your APIs are behaving.

Both Tide and Danske Bank have pretty consistent median latencies across the different clouds. Tide has a variation of 38 ms and Danske Bank 40 ms.

This implies a pretty low standard deviation and this will help get your Fintech API CASC score up. You don’t which cloud your users are going to be invoking you from and you want to make that they get the same high quality service wherever it is.

As we can see from Clydesdale Bank, which is tenth in terms of outliers, its variation in Total Time is rather great than for Tide and Danske Bank at 65 ms. It’s by monitoring these metrics and working to optimize your architecture and network configuration that you can deliver the best possible service to your users.

Fintech API Metrics: Overall Performance

Week Ending 9 February 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	RadarRelay	9.22
Fintech	Square (Sandbox)	9.45
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	9.52
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.70
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide	9.49
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Bank of Ireland	9.69

Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox) in the Open Banking – UK – Sandbox Fintech API category takes the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.70. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional. Three out of the six categories are headed by organization with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week (plus one with a CASC score of 9.49). 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. Five out of the categories are headed by an API with CASC score of >9.25, which is a very acceptable level of performance.

Fintech API Metrics: Latency

Week Ending 9 February 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Kraken	222 ms
Fintech	Stripe	334 ms
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	103 ms
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	150 ms
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide (Auth)	155 ms
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	90 ms

HSBC in Open Banking – UK – Open Data again takes the overall title again with a median latency of 90 up from 87 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!

Fintech API Metrics: Worst Overall Quality

Week Ending 9 February 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Bithumb	7.98
Fintech	Nobody under 8.00!
Open Banking: PSD2	Nobody under 8.00!
Open Banking UK: API Sandbox	Nationwide (Sandbox)	3.05
Open Banking UK: Production	Creation Card (Auth)	3.39
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Nationwide Building Society (ATMs)	6.52

Nationwide (Sandbox) in the Open Banking – UK – Sandbox category takes the overall wooden spoon again with a CASC score of 3.05, up from 2.88 last week. See you again in a week as we delve yet further into February's Fintech API metrics. Also, don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for January and the weekly and monthly non-financial API reports. We will also be publishing special reports on the State of the APIs in the 2020, so that’s something else to look forward to!

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