How EBICS can be improved (Part 10) - EBICS downloads based on date and time specifications

In payments, it is becoming increasingly important for bank customers to be kept up to date on intraday payment movements, especially since the introduction of new procedures such as instant payments. This development also poses new challenges for the EBICS standard in the corporate customer business. EBICS customers usually have to actively retrieve information on payment movements from the bank server. The so-called historical download with date specification is the suitable method, especially for corporate customers using several EBICS clients. As, however, the historical download through EBICS is only specified to the day, in practice large volumes of data are downloaded several times intraday. Moreover, business timestamps for EBICS depend on the provision format and are therefore at best specified to the day and at worst simply not available on the bank server. The downloading clients then have the task of automatically filtering the redundantly downloaded data. Such behaviour currently places significant additional burdens on all systems involved, both on the part of the customers as well as the banks.

This situation could be remedied by extending the EBICS specification by defining specified time-controlled downloads.

In this case, the EBICS server would support an additional variant of the historical download. Unlike the previous standardised historical EBICS download, the time would now also be taken into account for the start and end times. Moreover, the stated times and dates should always refer to the time and date of provision. This would enable the EBICS server to deliver all data records that had been provided within the specified time period. For more flexible handling, it should also be permissible when making download requests to specify in each case only one of both times and dates. Otherwise, the download would behave in the same way as the previous standard download in the acknowledgement phase.

I think specifying such a uniform solution for all EBICS users in the EBICS standard could refine the download process for EBICS, reduce the burden on servers and significantly improve the process, especially given the growing need to be kept up to date. This would make the proprietary solutions already used in EBICS products superfluous.


Michael Lembcke