02 January 2018

Happy birthday EBICS! BL Banking turns 10!

At the beginning of the year 2008 the new Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard — for short EBICS — started for all banks in Germany.

At the same time, the first platform independent EBICS client BL Banking was rolled out.

Both the standard and the program itself can look back to a successful first decade.

EBICS: Practicable, fast and secure

When EBICS became mandatory for all banks in Germany ten years ago, many expectations had been raised, but the future of the new standard's evolution was rather uncertain.

EBICS, as the method for secure payment transactions over the Internet for companies and administrations, had a primary goal: to replace the outdated ISDN-based FTAM by a secure and much faster protocol. In addition, it should be easy to integrate EBICS as a component into all payment transaction products.

Looking back, one can attest without any doubt that the goals set for EBICS have been achieved and the expectations even have been exceeded. Today, it is impossible to imagine corporate banking without EBICS as a uniform and secure communication method. With its functionalities, the Internet standard ranks first for professional electronic banking of commercial banks.

Worldwide in use

EBICS has now reached banks and customers not only in Germany, France and Switzerland, but also in many other countries. In addition, the standard is constantly being further developed.

Besides SWIFT, EBICS is increasingly becoming the method of choice when it comes to the secure exchange of payments, be it in national or cross-border clearing or the new SCT Inst procedure for Europe-wide real-time transfers via SEPA.

Modern software for a modern process

Shortly before the introduction of EBICS, BL Banking, the EBICS client from Business-Logics, was launched in 2007. The program with a focus on user-friendliness and flexibility touches the pulse of the time: fast availability via the Internet, support of all operating systems, multilingual, simple installation routines and finally, full EBICS functionality.

The first deliveries to customers and banks are successful, the program is noticed by the technical press right from the start and receives consistently positive reviews. With the spread of EBICS, the program is growing and from 2009 also offers versions for the French market. From 2012, the app versions for mobile devices follow. Since 2017, the program also exists as a web version, which is installed as a portal solution on a server in the company.

BL Banking for Smartphone & Co.

With the introduction of smartphones and tablets into modern enterprises, new requirements are emerging: Electronic signatures and viewing account statements must also be possible on the move.

For BL Banking, mobile versions for iOS and Android appear, which are made available free of charge in the App Store or Play Store.

This means that BL Banking users are flexible and, in particular, safe when they are on the move: The apps receive the seal for secure mobile applications from TÜV Rheinland.

BL Banking as EBICS portal

The web application BL Banking Web is the ideal solution, especially for medium and large companies, since 2017: Convenient access via web browser for all employees with a single installation.

The server installation also offers further advantages, especially in the area of automated payments. For example, fetch schedules can be used in combination with the configurable file export to provide account statements for external programs.

Everything new with EBICS 3.0 in 2018?

EBICS evolves further: The new EBICS version 3.0 will bring some far-reaching changes from 2018 onwards. In the future, the order types known for several decades will be replaced by the so-called Business Transaction Formats (BTFs). This is a consequence of opening up the standard to meet new requirements.

Today's EBICS users are faced with the question of whether the changes will cause problems for the established workflows.

For BL Banking users, however, there is no need to worry: on the one hand, all necessary adjustments will be in place to make working as familiar as possible, and on the other hand, all adaptations for new EBICS versions will be covered by the software maintenance contract as usual without any additional cost.

The idea behind this is simple. Enterprises should concentrate on their core business, while Business Logics takes care of smooth EBICS.