Explaining why the API can appear to be slow
Our API is created using modern software development techniques and deployed to a scalable architecture within a cloud environment.
Aro acts as a broker and as such are dependent on calling a set of external APIs hosted by lenders who provide loan or financial product offers to customers.
There is a dependency therefore on how quickly those external lender APIs return a response to Aro - in our experience this can at times range between 1 - 28 seconds depending on the lenders on-panel (some tend to be faster at responding than others).
On top of our lender API requests there is additional processing Aro needs to do internally, such as an API call to a credit score bureau for each individual requesting the loan or credit card (if not already done by us in the last 14 days) as well as a set of decisioning rules used to optimally match customers to products - the combination of these typically add 1 - 2 seconds on top of the overall end-to-end request time.
The expectation from a partner for receiving an API response back from Aro under normal conditions for each of the different redirect journeys should be as below, taken as an average response time (note that these timings do not include network time between the partner and Aro):
- LOAN - approx. 14 seconds
- CREDITCARD - approx. 7 seconds
It is recommended therefore that this be taken into consideration when partners design their integrations to our API.
It is a recommendation that if partners build their own EC web UI to collect customer data prior to invoking the API that they implement a "Please Wait" (or similar) UI overlay whilst it is being invoked.