The Zürcher Kantonalbank takes on EBICS

For their electronic payment transactions, the Zürcher Kantonalbank has opted for a particularly stable and multibank-capable software solution. The largest of the Swiss Cantonal Banks will offer their corporate clients the internet-based electronic banking standard EBICS, which the Swiss credit institutions have agreed as a multibank-capable standard. In a request for proposal, PPI AG was able to prevail over numerous competitors with their electronic banking system TRAVIC-Corporate.

After the decision of the Swiss credit services sector for the particularly secure Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard (EBICS), Switzerland opted into the European EBICS community in order to join France and Germany in its further development. Even for other European financial centres, EBICS is currently gaining more acceptance as the payment transaction standard in the corporate client segment.

The EBICS protocol is used by companies as an integral component of their payment systems to process electronic payment transactions. Transactions are typically the issuance of payment instructions or obtaining account statements, status reports and payment advice. Electronic signatures are used for approvals. As a highly available and inexpensive standard, EBICS can handle very large volumes of data quickly and securely.

For companies, the procedure has the advantage that more and more banks across Europe are offering EBICS, which, in addition to the single European payment format SEPA, is prevailing as a congruent transmission protocol.

Already by early 2014, the Luzerner Kantonalbank had opted for PPI's TRAVIC-Corporate system. Other large Swiss banks are showing an increased interest in the system used by market leaders for EBICS solutions. The Zürcher Kantonalbank uses PPI AG's new transmission protocol on the basis of TRAVIC-Corporate. "We are working closely with the bank and providing a bespoke integration solution to the existing banking systems" said Michael Lembcke, product manager at PPI, responsible for the integration project of the Zürcher Kantonalbank and RECON.

"The Zürcher Kantonalbank will link the system directly to the central user management, reducing administration costs and optimising the security of the entire system landscape" explains Carsten Miehling, managing director of RECON, the sales partner of PPI AG in Switzerland.

Michael Lembcke