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German/European banking is not so bad, you can transfer money in one business day to any other EU/SEPA country without charge. You also have debit cards that ar

German/European banking is not so bad, you can transfer money in one business day to any other EU/SEPA country without charge. You also have debit cards that are widely accepted and allow you to pay directly from your bank account, which is also nice. There are not so many banks that offer APIs (only Commerzbank and N26 I think) but there are other interfaces that allow you to export transactions to third party systems. Could be worse I think.

_the_inflator 7y ago
Nope, Deutsche Bank as well: https://developer.db.com/ https://developer.db.com/
kayoone 7y ago
Due to PSD2 every bank in Germany/EU has to offer APIs for 3rd parties to access the data, but they all do it in their own way so the open banking standards like the UK has are still better, but it's something.
- pgeorgi 7y ago
  See HBCI/FinTS, but there's more money to be made by locking users to your API only...
geff82 7y ago
A bit late but: instant money transfer are now possible at almost every bank in Germany.
- majewsky 7y ago
  But they charge extra, no? Last month, I paid a bill through SEPA money transfer from a Volksbank account and it offered a checkbox for "instant transfer" (don't remember the exact wording). I was quite surprised to see a charge of 0,21 € for that in my account statement last week.
Slartie 7y ago
Actually nearly every German bank has offered API access to accounts to their customers since forever...20 or 30 years or so. It was called HBCI, then it was renamed to FinTS, and it was the most advanced and well-supported API to bank accounts with practically no parallel anywhere in the world. The killer feature was that it was standardized rather well, and every bank supported it, so it was no problem to get programs and apps that could speak to your 5 banks where you have 8 accounts and merge those into a single UI (there were even open-source implementations of the protocol to build bank support into your own applications). You could fetch transactions, but also trigger transactions, with no bank-specific website and - very important - no other middlemen of any kind involved. Then came all those new app-based banks like N26, and instead of implementing FinTS, they decided to just offer their proprietary app, and that's it. Some later implemented some kind of proprietary API as an alternative to FinTS (maybe FinTS wasn't hipster enough, because it's a bit old-school, XML-based instead of another REST-style HTTP thing with JSON), but those always lacked the core feature of FinTS, which is broad support of the same standard by many banks. And now we're getting PSD2, which in some ways wants to establish broad (mandated by law) support over many banks again, but not by specifying an API designed to be used by customers, but by businesses only. Hence what we in Germany were able to do as customers for a long time - magically access dozens of accounts at different banks from a single application and without ANY middlemen involved - is now gradually becoming an ability that only corporations will have, because as a private individual it's practically impossible to meet the requirements to get access to PSD2 APIs (even though they basically do the same as FinTS already did for decades), and banks are already toying around with the idea of shutting down their FinTS API gateways somewhere in the future, because that other protocol is legally mandated and FinTS isn't.
- holoduke 7y ago
  another issue for businesses is that you pay lot more per transaction or batch when you use the api services of banks. For example we pay 2.50 euro for a sepa batch via ftp. For the same batch via the api we pay a monthly fee of 500 euros plus 4 euros per batch. The api provides instant payment processing. The ftp is a daily batch processing. We still use the ftp way, because the api one is too expensive
bloodm 7y ago
Yes. Banking is very cheap, you can get a free bank account. Transfers are cheap, EC card Payments is cheap for Merchants. What is there to complain about? Try to send money in the US... Send a check and scan it! Based on my experience with HSBC and SC (from HK) I doubt that they are really outstanding. Revolut? Well, you can buy crypto. But the App is terrible. Most critique here is basically about Apps not being good in EU/Germany. This may be the case but honestly I have zero interest in doing Banking via an app, except for transaction code generation (actually this was terrible at HSBC and SC). It is much more convenient to do this on my computer. If I want to use an app, it should be like WeChat or Alipay. But a banking App? I personally have no need for this.

_the_inflator 7y ago

Nope, Deutsche Bank as well: https://developer.db.com/ https://developer.db.com/

kayoone 7y ago

Due to PSD2 every bank in Germany/EU has to offer APIs for 3rd parties to access the data, but they all do it in their own way so the open banking standards like the UK has are still better, but it's something.

pgeorgi 7y ago
See HBCI/FinTS, but there's more money to be made by locking users to your API only...

geff82 7y ago

A bit late but: instant money transfer are now possible at almost every bank in Germany.

majewsky 7y ago
But they charge extra, no? Last month, I paid a bill through SEPA money transfer from a Volksbank account and it offered a checkbox for "instant transfer" (don't remember the exact wording). I was quite surprised to see a charge of 0,21 € for that in my account statement last week.

Slartie 7y ago

Actually nearly every German bank has offered API access to accounts to their customers since forever...20 or 30 years or so. It was called HBCI, then it was renamed to FinTS, and it was the most advanced and well-supported API to bank accounts with practically no parallel anywhere in the world. The killer feature was that it was standardized rather well, and every bank supported it, so it was no problem to get programs and apps that could speak to your 5 banks where you have 8 accounts and merge those into a single UI (there were even open-source implementations of the protocol to build bank support into your own applications). You could fetch transactions, but also trigger transactions, with no bank-specific website and - very important - no other middlemen of any kind involved. Then came all those new app-based banks like N26, and instead of implementing FinTS, they decided to just offer their proprietary app, and that's it. Some later implemented some kind of proprietary API as an alternative to FinTS (maybe FinTS wasn't hipster enough, because it's a bit old-school, XML-based instead of another REST-style HTTP thing with JSON), but those always lacked the core feature of FinTS, which is broad support of the same standard by many banks. And now we're getting PSD2, which in some ways wants to establish broad (mandated by law) support over many banks again, but not by specifying an API designed to be used by customers, but by businesses only. Hence what we in Germany were able to do as customers for a long time - magically access dozens of accounts at different banks from a single application and without ANY middlemen involved - is now gradually becoming an ability that only corporations will have, because as a private individual it's practically impossible to meet the requirements to get access to PSD2 APIs (even though they basically do the same as FinTS already did for decades), and banks are already toying around with the idea of shutting down their FinTS API gateways somewhere in the future, because that other protocol is legally mandated and FinTS isn't.

holoduke 7y ago
another issue for businesses is that you pay lot more per transaction or batch when you use the api services of banks. For example we pay 2.50 euro for a sepa batch via ftp. For the same batch via the api we pay a monthly fee of 500 euros plus 4 euros per batch. The api provides instant payment processing. The ftp is a daily batch processing. We still use the ftp way, because the api one is too expensive

bloodm 7y ago

Yes. Banking is very cheap, you can get a free bank account. Transfers are cheap, EC card Payments is cheap for Merchants. What is there to complain about? Try to send money in the US... Send a check and scan it! Based on my experience with HSBC and SC (from HK) I doubt that they are really outstanding. Revolut? Well, you can buy crypto. But the App is terrible. Most critique here is basically about Apps not being good in EU/Germany. This may be the case but honestly I have zero interest in doing Banking via an app, except for transaction code generation (actually this was terrible at HSBC and SC). It is much more convenient to do this on my computer. If I want to use an app, it should be like WeChat or Alipay. But a banking App? I personally have no need for this.