Multibanking

A multibanking app is an account information service. The customer chooses a bank, confirms access there with strong customer authentication, and the provider reads balances and transactions through the bank's dedicated interface, in Germany usually built on the Berlin Group standard. The access is read-only. The customer renews it every 180 days, and a firm that offers it needs a BaFin registration as an account information service provider, or a passport from another EEA supervisor.

A payment from a connected account needs a second permission. The app then acts as a payment initiation service, which requires a BaFin license of its own. Many apps combine both roles, so the customer can see the account at bank A and transfer money from it in the same screen.

Nearly all German savings banks and private banks offer their retail customers multibanking in their own app, as Agicap (in German) notes, naming Sparkasse, Deutsche Bank and ING as examples. Apps from fintechs connect accounts at many banks and often other payment providers as well.

Behind many of these apps sits a specialist. finAPI, licensed and supervised by BaFin, sells a multibanking API to banks, insurers and fintechs, with add-ons that categorize transactions, detect insurance contracts and run cash flow analyses for credit applications. The same data feeds open banking in lending.

A company with accounts at several banks needs more than a view of balances. Corporate multibanking software adds payment runs, reporting and cash flow forecasts, and connects to the banks over corporate channels such as EBICS, SWIFT or host-to-host links, as Agicap describes. Some banks also open an API program for this purpose. For the treasury side, see corporate treasury.

Security weighs more here. A single login that sees every account of a company is an attractive target, so a treasurer asks first about access rights, multi-factor authentication and the provider's API security.

Switzerland has no PSD2, so its banks built multibanking by agreement. Swiss Fintech Innovations started the initiative in 2022, and in May 2023 numerous Swiss banks signed a memorandum of understanding coordinated by the Swiss Bankers Association. Multibanking for private customers launched on November 25, 2025 on bLink, the open banking platform of SIX, with eight banks and two fintechs at launch and more than 30 banks providing the interfaces.

PostFinance offers the service free of charge in e-finance and its app. Payment and savings accounts of other banks can be added, custody accounts and crypto cannot yet, and payments from third-party accounts are not possible yet. The wider picture is on open banking in Switzerland.

Finance Loop is the meeting place for people who build the bank interfaces and the apps on top of them in Germany, Austria and Switzerland: product teams at banks, account information providers, treasury software firms and their compliance staff. It connects the finance, IT and AI communities, with events in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg.

Finance Loop is a strategic partner of the Digital Euro Association, whose Digital Euro Conference in Frankfurt covers digital money infrastructure next to open banking.

Multibanking is the display and, with some providers, the use of accounts from several banks in one app or e-banking view. In the EU it is an account information service under PSD2; payments from the connected accounts are a separate payment initiation service.

Under PSD2 the customer confirms access at their own bank with strong customer authentication, and only a provider registered or licensed by a supervisor may use the bank's interface. The remaining risk sits with the provider's own security, since one login shows every connected account.

In the EU, yes, when the app is also licensed as a payment initiation service. In Switzerland the bLink service started with account display; PostFinance, for example, does not yet allow payments from third-party accounts.