Australian Open Banking APIs are fast and reliable
Australian Open Banking provider Frollo has released the second edition of its Open Banking API performance monitor today. The fintech compared performance for 24 Data Holders live on its Open Banking platform in Q3 2021.
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 near real-time data.
An encouraging start for many Data Holders
With many Data Holders launching in Q3 2021, 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.
On average, Australian Open Banking APIs return data quickly, with great reliability. The end to end response time for Open Banking APIs in Q3 2021 was 0.84 seconds, with 98.9% of those API calls being successful.
According to Frollo CIO Tony Thrassis, it’s an encouraging start, “A success rate of close to 99% 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. We’ll also see more API calls by other Data Recipients, putting 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’re getting the user experience close to 100%, which is critical for use cases like lending and customer onboarding.”
Five banks return transaction data in less than 0.5 seconds
In Q3 2021, 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 who topped the list in August 2021.
Up returns Accounts and Bulk Balances 3 – 4x faster than the second fastest bank
When it comes to the Accounts API and Bulk Balances API there’s no measure on Up. In Q3 2021 the neobank’s response time for the Accounts API was 0.11 seconds, with number two, NAB, delivering Accounts data in 0.47 seconds.
A similar situation can be seen for the Bulk Balances API, where Up’s response time is 0.09 seconds and number two, 86:400, 0.32 seconds.
The average response time for both of these APIs is less than 1 second, with the slowest banks coming in just under 2.5 seconds.
Open Banking API performance monitor
The Frollo Open Banking platform 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 we publish our findings in our Open Banking API performance monitor, September numbers are available now.
