Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard

The Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard (short EBICS) is a transmission protocol for banking information for usage by banking clients.

The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) concentrates on standardisation of clearing protocols in the interbank networks. The SEPA-Clearing guidelines do not supplant any national clearing transmission protocols. Theoretically the national banking transmission standards could be prolonged for decades.

The German Zentraler Kreditausschuss (ZKA / Central Credit Committee) initiated a project to replace the national banking clearing system based on FTAM

FTAM

FTAM, ISO standard 8571, is the OSI Application layer protocol for File Transfer Access and Management.The goal of FTAM is to combine into a single protocol both file transfer, similar in concept to the Internet FTP, as well as remote access to open files, similar to NFS...

(short BCS-FTAM). The design goals were specifically set to create a transmission protocol that can be used by other countries as well - the initial "E" has been intentionally included to allow renaming the EBICS standard to read "European BICS" later on.

On 1 January 2006 the new EBICS transmission protocol was included in the German DFÜ-Abkommen (EDI

Electronic Data Interchange

Electronic data interchange is the structured transmission of data between organizations by electronic means. It is used to transfer electronic documents or business data from one computer system to another computer system, i.e...

-Agreement - enacted first on 15 March 1995). Since 1 January 2008 all German banks must support the EBICS transmission protocol and the required support for BCS-FTAM ends on 31 December 2010. It is expected that German banks will cease support for BCS-FTAM during 2011.

On 14 November 2008 a cooperation with the French "Comité Français d’Organisation et de Normalisation Bancaire" (CFONB - standardisation office in the banking sector of France) was pronounced such that EBICS would be adopted for usage in France. On 5 May 2009 a joint committee was created to resolve a modified EBICS. On 12 February 2010 a common EBICS for Germany and France was published (Version 2.4.2).

Most changes on the common EBICS involved to embed the French ETEBAC-3 message types and ETEBAC-5

Etebac5

ETEBAC5 is the secured version of the French Protocol ETEBAC .ETEBAC enables the exchange of financial information like Payorders & Account Statements.Three layers exist in Etebac5:...

signature elements into the EBICS transmission format where currently ETEBAC is transported via X.25

X.25

X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet switched wide area network communication. An X.25 WAN consists of packet-switching exchange nodes as the networking hardware, and leased lines, Plain old telephone service connections or ISDN connections as physical links...

packet network lines (in Germany the BCS-FTAM protocol is using ISDN direct lines). The French Telecom has announced to relegate the X.25 network by end of 2010 and to cease support on 1 July 2011.

The EBICS protocol is based on an IP network. It allows to use standard HTTP with TLS encryption (HTTPS) for transport of data elements. The routing data elements are encoded in XML and optionally signed and encrypted with X.509 PKI certificates (replacing older RSA keys). The EBICS transmission protocol can be used to wrap SEPA-XML statements as they come forward.

The standard does include two major areas - for usage in the bank-client transmission including statements of account (MT940/STA) and for interbanking clearing. The German Bundesbank has adopted the EBICS transmission protocol on 28 January 2009 to accept clearing information to be routed to the SWIFTnet interbanking network. The Bundesbank will only accept SEPA statements via SWIFTnet FileAct or EBICS submissions.

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