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This is a post-1.6 (maybe even post-1.x) discussion.
The online banking world is far less globalized than one would believe.
How many competing standards are there in the US? I read about OFX vs. SET
vs. Gold vs. IFX ... Now how will the situation change if we go to another
country? Right, each will have their own set of funky standards.
Since I am going to live in Germany for the next years, I am interested in
the German standard for online banking. It is called "HBCI" (Home Banking
Computer Interface...?). The specifications are publicly available, as
well as two reference API implementations for Windows in C, C++ and Java.
Of course, none of them are GPL or comparable.
HBCI uses a "delimiter syntax" (i.e. *not* XML) that's derived from
another standard called UN/EDIFACT (maybe a European thing?). It uses
TCP-Port 3000 for its communication (i.e. *not* http and/or SSL). It comes
with RSA signatures/encryption algorithms. The user's secret key has to be
saved on a "secure medium" which, in the long term, is a smartcard that
requires the user to own the appropriate reader. As a migration path, the
user can store the secret key on a floppy disk (no joke, works even under
Linux). The documents are in German and there are some english documents
available, but beware of horrible translations...
http://www.sixsigma.de/dokumente/hbcicomp.pdf is a 40-page overview but a
bit outdated. http://www.hbci.de/english is the hompage of the
standarization commitee and it has the most horrible translation I've seen
in quite some time :)
There are some efforts on a European harmonization in terms of online
banking standards, http://www.ecbs.org but it seems there's no standard
coming up soon.
A search for hbci on sourceforge reveals two projects which try to create
a Open Source API for HBCI. Both are still in the "planning" stage and
haven't released any files yet. I've contacted the developers - if I hear
anything back, I'll follow up here.
Christian
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