Data from Frollo’s Open Banking platform shows that 86:400 and Up provide transactions twice as fast as most other banks.
July 2021 marked a big milestone for the Consumer Data Right in Australia, as data sharing obligations kicked in for most Australian banks. With 36 live Data Holders today, we’re getting close to reaching 90% coverage.
So, we decided it’s time to answer the question: How are the APIs that underpin the CDR actually performing?
With over 14 Million Open Banking API calls to 36 providers, Frollo is in a unique position to compare how long it takes for them to deliver consumer data via Open Banking APIs. So that’s what we did with our Open Banking API performance tracker.
The results below are average, end to end response times for brands with a sufficient number of production API calls, taken from the Frollo Open Banking platform.
Response time for transactions
86:400 provides transaction data in less than 300 milliseconds
August 2021 data for brands that had a sufficient number of API calls, paints a picture of neobanks leading the way with fast Open Banking APIs.
The ‘Transactions for account API’ returns all transactions for an account, including date & time, amount and description. 86:400, Up and Beyond Bank all provided transactions in less than 500 milliseconds on average. That’s a stark difference when compared with some of the slower banks that took more than 2,000 milliseconds to provide this data.
Overall, 7 out of 22 brands returned the data in less than 1,000ms and the average across all brands was just under 700ms.
Response time for account data
Up response time for the Accounts API was more than 3x faster than the second fastest bank
Another API that’s frequently used is the Accounts API. It provides basic information for a specific account, like the status, product category and whether the account is owned by the authorised customer.
The clear winner was Up Bank – by a margin. With a 107ms response time the neobank nearly achieved a sub 100 millisecond average. Number 2, NAB averaged at 456ms.
In total, 8 brands were able to return account information in less than 1,000ms, 6 took more than 2,000ms.
The average across all brands was just under 900 milliseconds.
Response times for bulk balances
Up delivers bulk balances in less than 100 milliseconds
The last API we looked at for this comparison is the Bulk Balances API. It provides balances for multiple, filtered accounts. Here Up Bank was able to break the 100 millisecond barrier and returned bulk balances in 86ms on average.
Number two 86:400 took just over 300ms and a total of 9 brands came in under 1,000ms. 5 brands took more than 2,000ms to provide the balances.
The average across all brands was just over 800 milliseconds.
