Open banker Frollo released the second edition of the Open Banking API performance monitor, comparing performance of the various data holders on its Open Banking platform.
Speed and reliability are crucial for building successful Open Banking use cases.
Open Banking can help streamline mortgage decisions, improve financial wellbeing and automate customer onboarding, but only if it provides reliable access to real-time data.
An encouraging start for many Data Holders
With many Data Holders launching in the third quarter of the 2021 financial year, most had only been live for one or two months by the time their performance was measured.
Still, Open Banking is off to an encouraging start both in terms of speed and reliability as on average, Australian Open Banking APIs return data quickly, with great reliability.
The end to end response time for Open Banking APIs in the third quarter of the 2021 financial year was 0.84 seconds, with 98.9% of those API calls being successful.
According to Frollo’s Chief Information Officer Tony Thrassis, this is an encouraging start.
“A 99% success rate is a great result, especially this early on. Over time we’ll see banks further developing and optimising their API performance, increasing speed and reliability.”
“More API calls by other data recipients puts more pressure on data holder’s systems.”
“We’ll never get to 100% reliability, that’s why we’ve built resilience into our Open Banking platform. If an API call fails, we’ll automatically try again using a backoff algorithm.”
“This is how we are encouraging efforts in getting the user experience close to 100%, which is critical for use cases like lending and customer onboarding,” said Tony Thrassis.
Banks return transaction data in less than 0.5 seconds
Five banks returned transactions in under 0.5 seconds on average. New Data Holders P&N Bank and Credit Union SA join 86:400, Beyond Bank and Up to top the list.
Up returns Accounts and Bulk Balances fastest
When it comes to the Accounts API and Bulk Balances API there’s no measure on Up.
In the third quarter of 2021 the neobank’s response time for the accounts API was 0.11 seconds, with the second placed NAB, delivering accounts data in 0.47 seconds.
A similar situation has been experienced for the Bulk Balances API, where Up’s response time is 0.09 seconds and the second placed 86:400’s response time is 0.32 seconds.
The average response time for both of these Application Programming Interfaces is less than 1 second, with the slowest banks posting responses in just under 2.5 seconds.
Open Banking API performance monitor
Frollo Open Banking has made over 16 million Open Banking API calls in production to date.
This provides Frollo a unique perspective on API performance between the different Data Holders. Every month Frollo publishes findings in the Open Banking API performance monitor.
