EBICS
Your bank already speaks to software. Most companies still answer by hand.
EBICS is the European standard for exchanging files between a company and its banks, designed to be driven by software rather than by a person in front of a portal.
Statements come down and payment files go up, without anyone logging in.
What a portal costs you every morning
Someone logs in to each bank, downloads yesterday's statements, saves them somewhere, then uploads them into the accounting system. Then the same person, or another one, uploads the payment file and waits.
It works. It also means the day cannot start before that person has done it, and that nobody can say with certainty that every file of every account was fetched.
What changes with a machine to machine link
The bank exposes an access point, your company authenticates with its own cryptographic keys, and the exchange happens without a human in the middle.
Statements that arrive on their own
A scheduled task collects the files from every account, every day, and posts them where they belong. Nothing waits on somebody being at their desk.
Payments that leave the same way
A payment batch or a payment order goes to the bank from the moment it is approved, in the format the bank expects.
A test mode before the real thing
Submissions can be validated against the bank in test mode before anything is switched to production. Bank onboarding is where projects usually lose weeks.
Several signatories, from a phone
Distributed signature lets more than one person approve a payment from an external signing application, which is what a segregation of duties policy usually requires.
The formats your banks actually send
The European statement formats and the French interbank format are read as they come, so a company banking in several countries does not need a converter in between.
Bank configuration is not for everyone
Access to the banking setup is a permission of its own, separate from ordinary accounting rights, so the connection cannot be altered by whoever happens to have an accounting login.
Which banks, and what it takes
EBICS is recognised by German, French, Swiss and Austrian banks and by most large European institutions. If your bank publishes an EBICS access point, it can be connected.
What it takes on your side is a set of keys to register with each bank and a short validation phase with them. We handle that part, and the test mode exists precisely so the first real payment is not the first attempt.
Where it fits
EBICS is one way of removing manual handling from the financial chain. It is rarely the only one.
Finance and accounting
The whole chain, from the first quotation to the annual accounts, and what we brought to it ourselves.
Isabel Connect
For Belgian companies already on Isabel, the same automation without touching your signing chain.
How we work
What a first project looks like, what we do ourselves, and what we ask of you.
Tell us which banks you work with
Name your banks and how statements reach your accounting today. We will tell you which of them expose an EBICS access point and what connecting them would involve.