the new standard for bank exchanges
EBICS : Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard

EBICS, communication protocol, based on the public IP network, has been selected by the CFONB (Comité Français d’Organisation et Normalisation Bancaires) as exchange protocol between client-banks. EBICS allows to send and receive files with your banking partners in France to replace Etebac 3 and 5.

Different reasons require to leave ETEBAC protocol developed in the 80s:

• the planned shutdown of the X25 network on which relies these protocols,
• the need for increased security,
• the implementation of SEPA credit transfers (transfer of varying file formats)

  
  Shutdown of the public X25 network
  (2011, Sept. 30)

  Today ETEBAC is obsolete. Different reasons fot that ; for example, new formats of SEPA payment (XML format) are not supported by Etebac.

Etebac3 is replaced by EBICS.

Since 2008, EBICS standard is used in Germany ; this standard is available in France since November 2009. It has been selected by the European banking authorities to standardize payments within Europe.

Subscribe an EBICS contract with your bank.
At first, you must contact the person in charge of your accounts in each financial institution to subscribe a contract for electronic data interchange according to the protocol EBICS.

Then, your bank will send you:

• access to the bank server
• identifiers of the bank (bank name & HostID)
• identifiers of the customer (Partner ID contract Nr & user of the UserID service
• and 2 certificates of the bank server
  • server certificate dedicated to authentication
  • server certificate dedicated to encryption

Once you will have obtained these items, you could continue on your project to migrate Etebac toEBICS.