The most important at a glance
Here you can find all important points of our XS2A API at a glance.
What XS2A means
The abbreviation XS2A stands for "access to account" and refers to the regulated access option to payment accounts at banks and savings banks in the European Union in accordance with the EU Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2).
The XS2A interface of the savings banks and Landesbanken follows the Berlin Group specification and is implemented via RESTful Services (Representational State Transfer). You can use it for payment accounts, i.e. private and business current accounts, for which the customer has approved the use by Third Party Providers (TPP).
Your most important features
Payment account connectivity
Thanks to PSD2, you can access personal and business checking accounts with online banking access with the consent of the account holders.
Retrieval of account lists
Depending on the account type, you receive the IBAN, account currency and the institution-specific product name of the account as well as the turnover. Posted balances are transferred to you with currency and date.
Query period > 90 days
Under certain conditions, the call-off may provide you with sales that are older than 90 days - separate customer consents may have to be obtained for this.
Trigger payments
You submit payment orders for single, collective, real-time and forward transfers via the XS2A interface.
Briefly explained - background to PSD2
With the implementation of the European directive PSD2 (Payment Services Directive 2), a number of changes have occurred for payment services. One of the main objectives of PSD2 is to promote competition and innovation in the area of payment services.
The most important change for customers of savings banks and Landesbanken is that they can give regulated third parties access to their payment accounts under PSD2. For customers, this means that they can also use applications and services provided by account information services and payment initiation services - services that are not offered by their account-holding institution. Explicit permission from customers is required for this.
380
XS2A gives you access to the payment accounts of around 380 Sparkassen and Landesbanken as well as Weberbank.
50 Mio
In total, around 50 million current accounts are managed by the members of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe (incl. accounts without online banking access).
Exemption from provision of emergency mechanism
The XS2A interface of the savings banks offers the a high level of reliability. The dedicated interface of the savings banks and Landesbanken meets the requirements of Article 33(6) of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389. The savings banks and Landesbanken have therefore been exempted from providing a contingency mechanism in terms of Article 33(4).
To use the API you must meet the following requirements:
To access savings bank accounts as a Third Party Provider (TPP), you must have a PSD2 license issued by a competent supervisory authority. In Germany, the locally competent supervisory authority is the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin).
If you have received a PSD2 license from another local supervisory authority within the European Union, you need a so-called passporting to be allowed to use this license in Germany as well.
You need an EIDAS certificate, which is used for identification. Bundesdruckerei is a possible so-called Trust Center, which issues both the test and the real certificates for access to the XS2A interfaces to authorized TPPs.