HBCI (Home Banking Computer Interface) is a bank-independent protocol for online banking, developed and in use by German banks.It is a publicly available specification that defines the communication between online banking applications and the credit institutes' servers. In Germany, roughly half of all banks offer online banking through HBCI, which are approximately 2000 banks.
HBCI was originally designed by the two German banking companies Sparkasse and Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken and German higher-level associations as the Bundesverband deutscher Banken e.V.. The result of this effort was an open protocol specification, which is publicly available. The standardisation effort was necessary to replace the huge number of deprecated homemade software clients and servers (some of them still using
BTX-emulation). While
IFX (Interactive Financial Exchange),
OFX (Open Financial Exchange) and
SET are tailored for the north-american market,
HBCI is designed to meet the requirements of the European market. Features of
HBCI are:Multibanking: The software clients are designed to support accounts on multiple banking companies.platform-independent: The specification allows to develop software for various types of clients.
DES- and
RSA-encryption and -signatures. The key is stored on a chip card for higher physical security. HBCI has been superseded by its successor
FinTS, but as of 2005 most of the banks in Germany still use HBCI.
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