Fintech API Ratings Dec 28–Jan 4: Cryptocurrency Exchanges

API Performance

Happy New Year! We took a week off last week for the Christmas/New Year holiday, but now we are back at the grindstone with our weekly Fintech API ratings.

For our Fintech API ratings, we look at over 100 APIs and pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for the service quality for an organization’s APIs in a particular Fintech API ratings category with our patented CASC score.

Something of interest

CryptoCompare props up the Cryptocurrency Exchanges Fintech API category table this week.

It has a 100% pass rate, but has a lot of outliers and is very slow with a median latency of 1189 ms, more than twice as slow as the next slowest (HitBTC at 528 ms).

CryptoCompare is obviously hosted in Europe. It’s horribly slow from anywhere else in the world. We can’t say too often that you need to understand what your users are experiencing. Your API might be perfectly fine for you exercising an endpoint from the same country the server is located in. But we live in a globalized world now. Your users might be on another continent. They don’t want 2000 ms of additional latency.

There is no single rate-determining component. DNS Lookup Time is essentially fine, but Handshake Time and Download Time both show how much faster Europe is that other regions, especially East Asia and Oceania.

It would definitely be worth CryptoCompare having a look to see if they can do something to optimize performance across all regions. For instance, slow Download Time might be a product of transferring a large payload between continents or it could just be a slow connection. There might well be things that could be done.

Fintech API Ratings: Overall Performance

Week Ending 4 January 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	RadarRelay	9.31
Fintech	Stripe	9.46
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	9.74
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.63
Open Banking UK: Production	Danske Bank	9.57
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Bank of Ireland	9.78

Bank of Ireland in the Open Banking – UK – Open Data category takes the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.78, up from 9.70. two weeks ago. 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 an API with CASC score of 9.31 or more, which is a very acceptable level of performance.

Fintech API Ratings: Latency

Week Ending 4 January 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Kraken	213 ms
Fintech	Stripe	309 ms
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	103 ms
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Starling Bank (Sandbox)	138 ms
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide (Auth)	154 ms
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	86 ms

HSBC in Open Banking – UK – Open Data again takes the overall title again with a median latency of 86 ms, down from 87 ms two weeks ago. 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

Week Ending 4 January 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	CryptoCompare	7.17
Fintech	Nobody under 8.00!
Open Banking: PSD2	Nobody under 8.00!
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Barclays (Sandbox)	7.10
Open Banking UK: Production	Creation Cards (Auth)	6.70
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Halifax	7.04

Creation Cards (Auth) in the Open Banking – UK – Production category takes the overall wooden spoon again with a CASC score of 6.70, up from 4.85 two weeks ago. We have now split out the financial APIs and the non-financial ones 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 many UK Open Banking APIs (we now monitor all nine of the CMA9 banks) to the ones we monitor and the performance of which can be seen at our API.expert site. See you again in a week as we plow further into 2021. Also don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for December and the weekly and monthly non-financial API reports.

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