You are a bank customer and you are using EBICS: Will your EBICS monitoring still work with EBICS 3.0?

Since EBICS 2.5, EBICS clients cannot only use the purely text-based customer protocol but also an XML-based customer protocol for monitoring EBICS processes and results. The XML-based customer protocol is particularly suitable for automated evaluations. For downloading the protocol from the EBICS server, the EBICS client can use the order type PTK for the text-based protocol and the order type HAC for the XML-based protocol. With EBICS 3.0, the text-based protocol is no longer part of the specification. Moreover, changes of the HAC protocol have to be considered during automated result evaluation. Due to the required overall version interoperability, these changes partly affect EBICS clients of previous EBICS versions too, if an EBICS bank server supports EBICS 3.0.

Hence, software manufacturers and EBICS users must be prepared for changes of EBICS clients that already provide functions for the automated customer protocol evaluation. First, a change from PTK to HAC should be performed for automated evaluations in EBICS clients. Furthermore, users of the HAC protocol must be aware that with EBICS 3.0 the final HAC protocol is displayed differently.

Up to now, the HAC end flag with the identifiers ORDER_HAC_FINAL_POS and ORDER_HAC_FINAL_NEG has provided information on whether the submission was positive or negative. With EBICS 3.0, only the HAC end flag ORDER_HAC_FINAL is still available which informs on the submission’s result in conjunction with the last reasons code only. The final code DS04, for example, stands for the order’s rejection whereas code DS05 proves that the order was successfully submitted and forwarded to the bank system. Further reason codes have to be considered.

To make sure that your EBICS monitoring will still provide the correct results, I recommend to rely on the HAC customer protocol and to focus on the evaluation of the reason codes. This way, you can easily keep track of the EBICS communication with your financial institution.

Michael Lembcke