What Is AqBanking ?

AqBanking has three major goals which are described in the following paragraphs.

This graphic shows the general idea behind AqBanking's structure.

1. Generic Online Banking Interface

The intention of AqBanking is to provide a middle layer between the program and the various Online Banking libraries (e.g. AqHBCI, OpenHBCI etc).

Currently AqBanking supports the following banking operations:

• retrieving account balance
• retrieving account statements
• transfers (Ueberweisungen)
• debit notes (Lastschriften)
• internal transfers (Ueberweisungen zwischen zwei Konten einer Bank)
• EU transfers (transfers within the European Union)
• standing orders (Dauerauftraege)
• dated transfers (terminierte Ueberweisungen)
• loading prepaid cards for cell phones

The real work is done in banking backends. The first backend is AqHBCI, a library which implements a client for the German HBCI (Home Banking Computer Interface) protocol.

1.1. HBCI-Backend

HBCI is the German Homebanking Computer Interface (a home banking protocol) supported by most German banks.

The backend AqHBCI currently supports these security media:

• DDV chipcard (DES-DES-Verfahren)
• RSA chipcard (RSA-DES-Hybrid, cards sold by Matrica)
• OpenHBCI keyfile (either OpenHBCI 1 or 2)
• PIN/TAN (PIN/TAN mode using HTTP over SSL)

1.2. OFX Direct Connect Backend

This banking protocol is used mainly in the US. Currently the following jobs are supported:

• requesting a list of accounts
• requesting account statements (balance etc)
• requesting transaction statements

1.3. EBICS-Backend

EBICS is a replacement for the old FTAM protocol which was used for business banking accounts. There is a closed-source version of AqBanking which supports the German version of the EBICS protocol (not the one used in France).

2. Generic Financial Data Importer/Exporter Framework

AqBanking uses various plugins to simplify import and export of financial data. It also provides the administration of profiles on a per import/export plugin basis.

Currently there are import plugins for the following formats:

• DTAUS (German financial format)
• SWIFT (MT940 and MT942)
• OFX, OFC (provided by LibOFX)
• OpenHBCI1(imports transactions from existing OpenHBCI1 config files)
• ERI (mut.asc file format used e.g. by Rabobank)
• CSV (comma separated values, supported by most office and spreadsheet programs, completely user adjustable). There are many precompiled profiles for many banks and applications. AqBanking5 comes with an editor for such profiles.

3. Providing Information About Credit Institutes

AqBanking provides a generic way to retrieve information about credit institutes. It also contains functions for resolving country codes (both numeric and short code lookup). Currently only information about German credit institutes is provided but the interface has been designed to be as open as possible.

For every country a plugin can be provided which gets the information. For German banks KtoBlzCheck is used.

AqBanking contains in its bank database information about:

• ca 20,000 German banks (including HBCI server information)
• ca 25,000 US banks (including OFX server information)
• ca 3,600 Swiss banks
• ca 2,300 Austrian banks

AqBanking also provides generic country information. This information contains:

• country name
• ISO 3166 country code (both numeric and alpha)
• currency name
• currency code (ISO 4217)

Supported Platforms

Supported Frontends

Basically all possible frontends (such as KDE, GNOME, console etc) are supported. This is accomplished by only a few callback functions for user interaction which can be overloaded by applications.

• console
• qt 4
• fox 1.6
• gtk 2
• cocoa

However, AqBanking was designed with programs using graphical user interfaces as well as programs which run without any user interaction whatsoever in mind.

License

AqBanking is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Please contact me () if you need a license for non-GPL projects.