Fintech API Ratings Summary: November 2020

Something of interest

HSBC languishes at the bottom of the Open Banking – UK – Open Data category of Fintech APIs this month, as it so often does.

The API has a 100% pass rate and is blisteringly fast. So why does it find itself in the Amber Zone?  It does have the highest percentage of outliers at 2.91%. The CASC score is all about consistency. And the HSBC API might be fast, but it is not consistently fast.

If we look at the average latency in November for a couple of example endpoints we will see the issue.

For the HSBC Get FCA Service Metrics BCA V1.0 endpoint (above), we the average response is very quick because of the caching at the gateway but there are a lot of outliers and variation in the response time.

We see this also for the HSBC Get Unsecured SME Loans V2.2 endpoint. Most calls are fast, but there are a lot of slower ones. That’s because the cache refreshes periodically and the output has to be pulled from the backend and that is much slower process.

The heatmap for this endpoint is mostly green, but there are some island of yellow, orange and red when the returned payload was not available in the cache. In an API with a higher CASC score, we would see more green. Being slower, but more consistent, will mean a less flaky API and, generally, a better overall experience for the end-user.

Fintech API Ratings: Overall Performance

November 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Coinpaprika	9.31
Fintech	Stripe	9.27
Open Banking: PSD2	ABN AMRO Bank (Sandbox)	9.60
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.66
Open Banking UK: Production	Danske Bank	9.37
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Bank of Ireland	9.64

Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox) takes the overall title this month with a CASC score of 9.66. 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 organizations 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 categories are headed by a Fintech API with CASC score of 9.27 or more, which is a very acceptable level of performance.

Fintech API Ratings: Latency

November 2020

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Coinbase	132 ms
Fintech	Stripe	304 ms
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	108 ms
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Starling Bank (Sandbox)	141 ms
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide (Auth)	151 ms
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	85 ms

HSBC in the Open Banking – UK – Open Data category takes the overall title again with a median latency of 85 ms, down from 88 ms in October. An important caveat: medians can be misleading! A Fintech 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 Ratings: Worst Overall Quality

November 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Oasis Dex	5.36
Fintech	Yodlee	7.71
Open Banking: PSD2	DNB PSD2 (Sandbox)	7.82
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	ForgeRock (Sandbox Auth)	3.76
Open Banking UK: Production	Creation Cards (Auth)	2.82
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	7.52

Creation Cards (Auth) in the Open Banking – UK – Production category takes the overall wooden spoon for November with a CASC score of 2.82. See you again in a month as we look at the State of the financial APIs in December and back at 2020. Also look out for our weekly reports on financial APIs and our weekly and monthly reports on non-financial ones.

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