[GNC-dev] Status of German online banking (aqbanking, HBCI, FinTS)

[Christian Stimming]

Dear developers,

just a quick status report of what is going on with German online banking 
these days: There were reports of major bank server changes on approx. 
September 14th, caused by new EU banking regulations called PSD2. This caused 
some changes in the online banking standard FinTS (formerly called HBCI), but 
there was only rudimentary documentation of what the protocol changes will 
actually be, at least according to what was known to the aqbanking library 
developers (mainly Martin). 

In the end, it turns out pretty much all bank servers have significantly 
changed their behaviour into something different than before. The previous 
stable library series (aqbanking 5.8.2) does not support those required newest 
changes anymore. Martin managed to get the communication to the various 
servers working again one by one, working on the most recent master branch of 
aqbanking (5.99.x, will be 6.x soon). The first reports about successful 
online banking have been flowing in, on the gnucash-de or aqbanking-user. Once 
this has stabilized some more, there will also be stable releases of aqbanking
+gwenhywfar which will give German online banking users a new series of stable 
packages. However, right now this is still somewhat in stabilization phase. If 
bugreports or questions occur for German online banking users, please ask them 
for some more patience unless they are willing and able to compile from source 
tarballs. Thanks!

Regards,

Christian