Fintech API Ratings, Nov 24-30: Cryptocurrency Exchange

Something of interest

There is a lot of variation in performance in the Cryptocurrency Exchange categories. Seven of the 17 APIs manage CASC scores of over 9.00, which is very good and 14 are in the Green Zone, indicating fully performant Fintech APIs, but we do have a couple of Fintech APIs in the Amber Zone and Coinlore languishing in the Red Zone this week with a CASC score of 45.83, a stark contrast with Gemini on 9.44.

It is interesting to look at the Process Time for the two contrasting Fintech APIs. Gemini is blistering fast in North America and nowhere as bad as Coinlore is everywhere except Europe.

Coinlore does fine in Europe, especially for IBM, where it almost manages to match Gemini. But this is why you need to be actively monitoring your APIs. If you just looked at Europe, you might think that Coinlore isn’t doing that much worse than Gemini.

But it’s when you put it in the larger context of performance across the other five regions that you see Coinlore’s true quality. Gemini’s slowest process time is 288 ms in Google South Asia. But outside Europe, Coinlore’s fastest is 403 ms from Azure North America.

Don’t be kidded by just looking at your API performance from where it is best. Cryptocurrencies are a global business and you will have customers all over the world. And cryptocurrencies are an area where every millisecond matters.

So make sure you know how you are really doing – and how you actually compare to your competitors – by monitoring your APIs and those of your rivals.

Fintech API Ratings: Overall Performance

Week Ending 30 November 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	OKEx	9.47
Fintech	Stripe	9.45
Open Banking: PSD2	ABN AMRO Bank (Sandbox)	9.56
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Royal Bank of Scotland (Sandbox)	9.61
Open Banking UK: Production	NatWest (Auth)	9.56
Open Banking UK: Open Data	Bank of Ireland	9.75

Bank of Ireland in Open Banking – UK – Open Data takes the overall title again this week with a CASC score of 9.75, up from 9.74 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 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 9.37 or more, which is a very acceptable level of performance.

Fintech API Ratings: Latency

Week Ending 30 November 2020

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Kraken	224 ms
Fintech	Stripe	303 ms
Open Banking: PSD2	Railsbank	107 ms
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	Starling Bank (Sandbox)	142 ms
Open Banking UK: Production	Tide (Auth)	152 ms
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	84 ms

HSBC in Open Banking – UK – Open Data again takes the overall title again with a median latency of 84 ms, down from 86 ms last week. 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 30 November 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges	Coinlore	4.68
Fintech	Nothing under 8.00!
Open Banking: PSD2	Nothing under 8.00!
Open Banking UK: Sandbox	OBIE Software Statement (Sandbox)	1.19
Open Banking UK: Production	Creation Cards (Auth)	1.55
Open Banking UK: Open Data	HSBC	7.52

OBIE Software Statement (Sandbox) in the Open Banking – UK - Sandbox category takes the overall wooden spoon with a CASC score of 1.19. We have now split out Fintech APIs 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 plunge into December. And don’t forget to look out for our October financial API report and the weekly and monthly non-financial ones.

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