New cooperation between Germany and France in the payments sector
– A further step towards the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA)

14 November 2008 - The German banking industry associations working together within the Zentraler Kreditausschuss (ZKA) and the French banking sector, represented by Comité Français d'Organisation et de Normalisation Bancaire (CFONB), today signed a cross­border cooperation agreement on the joint use of a new communication protocol for financial transactions on the internet which further enhances and standardises communication between corporate clients and banks.

This communication protocol, called Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard (EBICS), which was originally developed by the German banking industry, will become one of the leading solutions available on the European market. It will enable corporate clients to conduct their banking business flexibly, securely and efficiently and to select the most suitable services provider for their individual needs. EBICS also has “multi-bank capability”, meaning that corporate clients in both countries can reach any bank in Germany and France in future using the same software. It therefore brings benefits for hundreds of thousands of companies. EBICS is already being used in Germany and within the next two to three years it will help to replace the existing standards, namely FTAM in Germany and ETEBAC in France.

German and French banking industry representatives welcome in particular the agreement on a common IP communication protocol as a further major step towards the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). They feel that EBICS will provide significant impetus to competition in European payments processing. In order to promote the standardisation of payments, it is planned to extend EBICS use to other European countries.

The ZKA believes that the German-French cooperation agreement will considerably facilitate corporate clients' financial flow management, as EBICS can be used highly flexibly with regard to the business type it supports, i.e. credit transfers, direct debits, bank statements, cash and securities management or other financial services. Compared with the current communication standards, EBICS offers state-of-the-art security, cost-effective improvement in the area of data and line encryption and authentication (distributed digital electronic signatures) as well as higher transmission speed.