HBCI

HBCI (Home Banking Computer Interface) is a bank-independent protocol for online banking, developed for and used by German banks.

It is a publicly available specification that defines the communication between online banking applications and the credit institutions' servers. In Germany, roughly half of all banks offer online banking through HBCI - that is, approximately 2000 banks.

HBCI was originally designed by the two German banking companies Sparkasse and Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken and German higher-level associations as the Bundesverband deutscher Banken e.V.. The result of this effort was an open protocol specification, which is publicly available. The standardisation effort was necessary to replace the huge number of deprecated homemade software clients and servers (some of them still using BTX emulation).While IFX (Interactive Financial Exchange), OFX (Open Financial Exchange) and SET are tailored for the North American market, HBCI is designed to meet the requirements of the European market.Features of HBCI are:
* Multibanking: The software clients are designed to support accounts on multiple banking companies.
* Platform Independency: The specification allows software development for various types of clients.
* DES and RSA encryption and signatures.
* Storage of the encryption keys on an external physical device (a chip card) for improved security.HBCI has been superseded by its successor FinTS, but as of 2005 most of the banks in Germany still use HBCI.

External links

* [http://www.hbci-zka.de/english/index.htm FinTS - Financial Transaction Services]
* [http://www.aquamaniac.de/aqbanking/ AqHBCI software project]
* SWIFT