Multibanking – all in one portal

Standards as the basis for networked process automation

Data is the oil of the 21st century. For years this has been preached at all digital conferences. The more data a provider has from a customer, the better the customer can be clustered and classified into target group segments. This knowledge of the customer's needs allows the creation of interesting additional offers for them.

When, as part of the digitisation, the access channels are increasingly realised via the Internet, the decisive point of contact between financial institution and corporate customer will be "digital branches" such as the web-based corporate customer portal TRAVIC-Port. If the operator succeeds in aggregating all the customer's bank accounts, including those of other banks, at the digital point of sale and bundling them in an own portal, the operator has the best prerequisites for a holistic overview of the customer's payment transactions. The more accounts that are bundled here, the better service offers the operator can create for his customers.

The keyword "multi-banking" refers to this functionality of bundling the optimal payment transactions of a customer. Both sides - customer and financial institution - benefit from this combination under one roof. The customers are given a comprehensive overview of their transactions. The aggregation considers both submissions of all types of payments and downloads of the account information of all connected accounts. The multi-banking portal offers the users a unified, easy-to-use GUI for various payment providers using one secure access - and that way provides efficient internal processes. However, the benefit of this smooth automation of multiple payment transactions stands and falls with the speed of processing and the clean implementation of the bank servers from various providers. A high degree of networked transactions in both directions requires uniform interfaces and the compliance with the valid specifications. The EBICS-based communication of TRAVIC-Port provides the most secure, Internet-based, technical protocol for the SEPA area. All too generous adjustments and deviations from the specification prevent smooth processes on the part of the providers and stand in the way of a comprehensive, seamless consolidation of payments. Here, both the clients of the portal providers and the suppliers or software houses should pull together. In contrast, APIs with proprietary interfaces enable individual adaptation to the financial institution's technical environment. However, any deviation from the standards delays the smooth integration of the complex data traffic. An imprecise interpretation of the specification reduces the degree of automation and the data volume of each connection. The more gaps there are in the complex network of multi-banking connections, the lower the customer benefit and the quality of the analyses.

Guest author: Christian Veith