However, imagine you have to transfer large amounts of funds or you have the responsibility for other people's money in your company. What standards do you set here for the security and reliable, transparent processing of your payments? Large volumes not only concerning the amount of funds but also the technical sizes of the file processing for bulk payments require other procedures that have long been tested and established with trusted partners of the financial institutions. EBICS with batch processing of large collective files is the European banking standard on which all payment experts rely and which is being introduced step-by-step in a binding manner by more European countries. These established EBICS concepts have now been adapted for the real-time submission and instant payments enabling an innovative online processing.
Security does not exclude speed
The communication with your established financial institutions and the secure transfer of your payment files is now also provided with EBICS as a real-time submission. Based on the WebSocket interface introduced with the EBICS real-time specification, created payments or uploaded payment files are submitted to the bank server with the order type WIP (or corresponding BTF with EBICS 3.0). In the EBICS client the user immediately receives an active success message as a push message about the processing of the payment at the financial institution as a C5N notification. The standard protocol return messages of the financial institution's pain.002 status report are of course also provided. All this is possible if all the products involved are perfectly coordinated and integrated in the continuous process. Mobile EBICS apps for a payment release on the go also map these real-time processes.
The first financial institutions are using this feature in productive operation in order to provide their customers with the quality and security they are used to with innovative speed. It may take some time before the large funds transfers are "smart" and quickly transferred from the couch to the companies' accounting departments.
But who knows what habits have crept into some home offices in the meantime. In any case, decentralised work environments have reached a new dimension. Most companies now offer the possibility to work from home, and department heads and authorised signatories also work in their home office. Releases of large payments with distributed signatures are therefore submitted from home in real time and immediately confirmed.
Furthermore, the WebSocket protocol offers the additional option of push notifications sent from the financial institution to the users of the payment application. Apart from the simple status return messages for payments, the financial institution also communicates with its customers in the form of text messages. At the user's request, the messages appear as a flyout on the GUI and are collected in a separate mailbox for reading and downloading.
APIs or not: A smart and fast processing with the usual security standards of your financial institution is no problem with EBICS either!
Author: Christian Veith
