Are Australian Open Banking APIs up to the task?
Performance data from 2021 reveals that most – but not all – Open Banking APIs are fast and reliable
Frollo, Australia’s leading Open Banking intermediary[1], has published its 2021 Open Banking API performance monitor. Based on over 15 Million API calls on its Open Banking platform in 2021, the report compares speed and – for the first time ever – reliability between banks. With only a few exceptions, most banks were found to be delivering a fast and reliable customer experience.
On average, the API response time in 2021 was 0.86 seconds and the reliability was 98.8%. Neobank Up led the charge, with an average response time of 0.26 seconds and 99.88% reliability of their Open Banking APIs in 2021..
Performance remains stable as the ecosystem grows
From July to December the number of live Data Holders included in Frollo’s Open Banking API analysis increased from 11 to 40[2]. Despite this growth, the average industry performance remained stable. API response times averaged below one second and reliability never dropped below 98%.
[1] Over 21 Million Open Banking API calls to date, more than 90% of all Open Banking API calls in Australia
[2] A Data Holder has to be live with a sufficient number of API calls to be included in this analysis
Up is the fastest and most reliable Data Holder in 2021
With an average response time of 0.26 seconds and 99.88% reliability across all Open Banking APIs, neobank Up outperformed all other Data Holders in 2021.
Eight of the 25 Data Holders made it into the bottom right quadrant of fast (< 1 second) and reliable (98%+) as represented in the graph below. Meanwhile, five Data Holders took more than two seconds to respond, with a reliability of less than 96%.
Neobanks up to 36x faster than slowest Data Holders
Although industry averages show a fast and reliable ecosystem, a closer look at the two most popular APIs (for collecting transaction data and account information) shows a big difference between the front runners and some of the slower Data Holders.
Neobank Up had an average response time for the Accounts API of 0.11 seconds. That’s more than 36x faster than HSBC, which took 4.05 seconds to respond on average.
11 Data Holders, including 86 400, bcu and Beyond Bank, had a response time of 0.5 seconds or less when their Transactions for accounts API was called. The slowest Data Holder (MyState Bank) took close to 4 seconds, or almost 5x as long as the leaders.
