Online-Bank in other countries?

Message Board
1

Hi,
in Germany, online banking uses FinTS (formerly known as HBCI - home banking Computer Interface) and EBCIS (Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard) for communication with the bank. (Some banks charge quite some amounts for EBICS, thus small associations use FinTS.)

I wonder what communication protocols are used in other countries? Esp. for smaller companies/associations.

I’m also interested in which software companies/associations are using for communicating with the bank. For FinTS I’m aware of aqbanking (often used with GNU Cash) and Jameica/Hibisus - neither of these seem to have an international user base.

2

We’re using Enable Banking (here’s the module).

The cost is high because it’s designed for distributors, but we can spread it with several customers, which makes it affordable in the end.

3

Most of our users are just using the net-banking application of their bank to upload and download SEPA and statement files.
We had a few times some request to automate the flow with some fintech service but most of the time it is too expensive for the marginal gain of time.

4

I’m thinking quite lot lately about automated accounting also known as robot accounting. In that case you are the gatekeeper and in control, but Tryton does all the rest. If it can automatically download the bank statements and import them and reconcile, you only have to look at the specific cases. The other part is when a supplier invoice comes in through UBL / Peppol, you only have to check if everything is in OK and confirm the invoice. Tryton will then create a payment based on the due date and automatically send it at the right time to the bank for payment.

Personally I’m searching for something very simple, just an API and because of very low traffic a ‘pay-as-you-go’ pricing model. After searching came across several companies, but Ponto or TrueLayer seems to have a payment per API call.

5

In Switzerland, we have QR-invoices. Supplier invoices can be read directly into tryton (sent to tryton be email or read the code with a scanner into tryton). Customer invoices can be generated in tryton. Paying is easy by just scanning the QR-Code with your banking app (or by using tryton and pain.001).

But the exchange of the payment is still a problem also here. We also do it manually by ebanking as Cedric mentioned (pain.001 and camt.053) and for all our customers that’s fine so far. EBICS is widely used by our banks and we already thought about integrating it, but the installation fee is a problem. We have to pay by access point, so we’d pay just once for all tryton.cloud SAAS users. But for individual instances that would be too expensive. Finally we still didn’t develop an EBICS module as there was no really need for it. As for Switzerland I wouldn’t be aware of any other standard than EBICS for direct bank interactions.