The German banks use an online banking protocol (yes, a *protocol* -- not only a file format) that is publicly available, called HBCI (HomeBanking Computer Interface). Guess what? It's already implemented in Gnucash through the OpenHBCI library. I can download transaction statements *and* make online money transfers right from inside Gnucash now.
Point is, online banking (just as the bank systems in general) is totally country-dependent, which limits both your developer and your user base. For countries which fortunately have some openly available standard it is possible to implement this in an OpenSource project.
Other countries: HBCI online banking in Germany
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The Future of Money
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· Score: 2, Informative
For non-U.S. residents it is a bit suprising that all geeks here really only discuss the monetary/banking system inside the U.S.. Please please listen: In other countries things are alreay waaay different.
E.g. I mean, here in Germany we have a banking system with fully functioning direct deposit/direct debits which can be used by almost everybody, not only big business. These direct money transfers work at small cost (probably $0.10-$0.30 per transaction, but not something like 1% of the amount) and usually with at most 1-2 days of delay. This is the reason why something like Paypal wasn't necessary at all in Germany -- the German banks already offer these services by themselves.
We have the bank-independent online banking protocol HBCI, with a free implementation here and GnuCash supporting it. This means that for a direct deposit (money transfer) I can directly enter the destination account in a GUI form in GnuCash, enter my secret RSA key passphrase, and *pow* the money goes its way. Same way for statement retrieval -- no screen scraping anymore or browser incompatibilities. HBCI is a full protocol so all these business actions are fully specified in that protocol, and no web browser is needed anymore.
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The German banks use an online banking protocol (yes, a *protocol* -- not only a file format) that is publicly available, called HBCI (HomeBanking Computer Interface). Guess what? It's already implemented in Gnucash through the OpenHBCI library. I can download transaction statements *and* make online money transfers right from inside Gnucash now.
Point is, online banking (just as the bank systems in general) is totally country-dependent, which limits both your developer and your user base. For countries which fortunately have some openly available standard it is possible to implement this in an OpenSource project.
For non-U.S. residents it is a bit suprising that all geeks here really only discuss the monetary/banking system inside the U.S.. Please please listen: In other countries things are alreay waaay different.
E.g. I mean, here in Germany we have a banking system with fully functioning direct deposit/direct debits which can be used by almost everybody, not only big business. These direct money transfers work at small cost (probably $0.10-$0.30 per transaction, but not something like 1% of the amount) and usually with at most 1-2 days of delay. This is the reason why something like Paypal wasn't necessary at all in Germany -- the German banks already offer these services by themselves.
We have the bank-independent online banking protocol HBCI, with a free implementation here and GnuCash supporting it. This means that for a direct deposit (money transfer) I can directly enter the destination account in a GUI form in GnuCash, enter my secret RSA key passphrase, and *pow* the money goes its way. Same way for statement retrieval -- no screen scraping anymore or browser incompatibilities. HBCI is a full protocol so all these business actions are fully specified in that protocol, and no web browser is needed anymore.
cstim