Real-time notifications for EBICS

With the Specification for Real-Time Notifications from July 2019, The German Banking Industry Committee introduced a standard for the direct exchange of notification messages between banks and customer systems.

The exchange of these messages does not take place via EBICS, but using the push method and the wss protocol.

Architecture of customer-bank systems for real-time notifications

The messages usually only contain information about changes in payment transaction processes, e.g. the availability of data to be fetched from the banking server by a customer. Customer client systems as recipients of real-time notifications can thus immediately fetch the just available payment information via EBICS for further processing.

For a direct transmission of push notifications, a WebSocket server at the bank is required to hold the permanent connections with the customers' WebSocket-enabled EBICS systems.

Simple real-time integration for BL Banking Server

The WebSocket server is provided as a program extension by Business-Logics and can be operated

as an independent program on a separate computer, usually within the DMZ,
as a stand-alone program on the computer of the BL Banking Server, or
as part of the BL Banking Server on the Application Server directly.

In particular, it is possible to operate several WebSocket servers in parallel.

The configuration in the Banking Server is simply done by setting system variables, for example for specifying the connection URL for the customers' client systems.

Availability

Both, the WebSocket Server and the new version of the BL Banking Server for real-time push notifications is available for all maintenance customers free of charge.