Open banking in Australia is relatively new, only entering the mainstream in July 2020. How are banks keeping pace in this fast-rising market?
This is what fintech Frollo wanted to find out when it set out to monitor the performance of open banking in the country. Based on over 15 million application programming interface (API) calls, the report compares the speed and – for the first time – reliability between banks and found that most banks were performing well on both standards, with the exception of a few.
From July to December, the number of live data holders compared in the report more than tripled from 11 to 40, but the performance remained stable for a large part. The average API response time was 0.86 and reliability was 98.8% for the whole of 2021.
Neobank Up led the pack for Accounts API with 0.11 seconds – a far cry from second placer NAB’s 0.59 seconds and around 36 times faster than HSBC’s 4.05, the slowest competitor. This category had an average response time of 0.26 seconds and 99.88% reliability. The Accounts API provides basic information for a specific account, including account status, product category and legitimacy of account ownership.
The other category, Transactions for Account API, enables a data recipient to request a list of transactions for a specific account. This can include transaction ID, date and time, type, status, amount and description.
86 400 – another neobank – took the lead with 0.21 seconds, closely followed by Beyond Bank Australia and bcu with 0.28 seconds. MyState Bank and Bank First lagged on the lower end with 4.84 and 4.55 seconds, respectively. The average speed stood at 0.84 seconds.
Companies who have inked a deal with Frollo will gain access to its Consumer Data Right (CDR) capabilities, allowing brokers to access customer data far more quickly from a range of lenders and data holders, thus reducing the amount of time taken to submit an application.
As of December, there are already 16 banks with 16 additional brands acting as data holders, representing 85% of the nation’s household deposits – and there are many more institutions going through the accreditation process, The Paypers reported.
