Businesses and consumers are losing out because UK banks are failing to prioritise fixing Open Banking outages, with 62 per cent of banks recording a fall in Open Banking availability to customers over the last quarter.

Peer-to-peer business lender Growth Street reviewed publicly-available data which the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) published on its API downtime monitoring tool. However, the analysis from Growth Street has been called into question by OBIE, with the organisation issuing a vigorous rebuttal of Growth Street's interpretation.

According to Growth Street, in the first quarter, Open Banking was only available 83 per cent of the time, down from an average of 95 per cent in the previous quarter - amounting to 5,000 hours of total downtime.

When the service is down, business and consumer users can’t access some features, including viewing borrowing options from other lenders.

HSBC was found to have the worst access time, dropping from 98 per cent availability in the fourth quarter of 2018 to 20 per cent in the first quarter of 2019, due to a series of long-running intermittent outages.

Meanwhile, Nationwide saw the greatest improvement, raising availability from 78 per cent to 96 per cent over the same period. Allied Irish Bank was top with 99 per cent availability in the first quarter of the year.

The data shows that banks appear not to be prioritising fixing these outages, as the average ‘service downtime’ took six weeks to fix.

Growth Street chief executive Greg Carter commented: “Over a year since the launch of Open Banking, banks are still failing to give customers a decent level of service.

“In the context of the Banking Remedies Fund awards - which should be going to those fuelling competition and collaboration in business banking - these figures show that the high street banks are still reluctant to show their customers the full breadth of finance options available," he continued, adding: “Banks talk a good game on Open Banking, but the raw data shows a very different picture."

However, the OBIE was quick to rebut Growth Street's analysis of its performance data.

In a statement released this morning a spokesperson for the OBIE said: "In October 2018, OBIE began publishing monthly updates regarding the performance of the Open Banking system at a technical level. We believe that making this data publicly available on a regular basis is important to the ecosystem; demonstrating transparency as well as monitoring the overall effectiveness and progress of open banking.

It stressed: “The data as presented by Growth Street today is misleading and inaccurate: our published metrics data shows very clearly that the average API availability in Q1 2019 was never less than 96.97% availability.“

The statement added: “Each of the mandated banks submit their monthly availability and performance metrics to OBIE which we make every effort, as far as is possible, to verify before publishing. JIRA data and the monthly metrics submitted by the banks to OBIE are compiled in very different ways – essentially the JIRA downtime system acts as a control and notification system regarding availability (eg. Planned Downtime, which in some instances does not actually take place) and cannot be used in isolation of other reporting metrics deployed.

"There is always room for improvement in data analytics reporting, and this is something we are currently reviewing with an independent supplier; however, we believe that the performance data we publish each month gives an accurate snapshot of banks’ API availability and overall technical performance," it concluded.

Responding to the OBIE's challenge, Greg Carter, chief executive of Growth Street, said his company was standing firm on its analysis of the OBIE data.

He said: “Growth Street has used a consistent and transparent methodology to compare API performance across all banks, which is different from the methodology used by the banks themselves when reporting to the OBIE.

“Both Growth Street and the banks' own reports show availability performance that is low relative to other crucial internet infrastructure providers, such as cloud computing services [which typically target 99.95% availability]*.

“We welcome the steps taken by the OBIE to review data analytics reporting with an independent supplier, and hope that ongoing scrutiny of availability will lead to improvements in performance, unlocking the potential opportunities Open Banking brings for customers," he added.

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