A few years have passed since then and most germans banks are still the same. Meanwhile you get instant wire transfers in a few countries.
When I think Deutsche Bank and innovation, I think of my phone calls with Deutsche Bank about disappearing money and them telling me that I shouldn't be surprised if the online banking doesn't actually reflect my real balance and 3 day same country wire transfers. A friend of mine has a consulting company that claims that theyre trying to change their internal structures though.
I think of shitty support and paper faxes because of "security". The latter might actually be a prevalent problem in german society though.
I work in Gvt. Healthcare. They've been spending 1 year trying to define an API for activating the new healthcare smartcards. It has 3 API calls, it's not done yet, and it's SOAP only. And then the leadership has been trying to get government support to mandate by law the forced usage of their crappy APIs.
Germany is a digital dinosaur, no matter how much these old tycoons come to the bay area with their newly appointed chief of innovations for a week they won't get it, because they never had to compete on anything to get it.
User experience is a completely foreign concept to them.
(A few challenger banks like Monzo are trying to give Britain decent retail banking. I wish them luck.)
At the Zollamt you'll get to enjoy standing in at least 3 separate and consecutive lines. Only to pay import taxes. Something that could have been done faster, cheaper and more conveniently by sending an invoice.
This is how it works if the seller fills out CN22 properly and the customs officials believe the declared contents/value.
I have several times received packages with duties that I paid on delivery. No need to travel to the Zollamt.
I have also been to the Zollamt when they suspect the package contains something else than what is on the shipping manifest. They're always quite giddy to catch you doing something not allowed and always end up terribly disappointed and grumpy when it's exactly as described and then you just pay VAT.
Digital signatures by themselves only provide non repudiation of the sender non the receiver. When in court, you as a sender will have to prove that the receiver actually received the data. § 371 ZPO [1]
When sending a Mail per Einschreiben, the receiver instead has to prove that he didnt in fact get the message. Why that also applies to FAX blows my mind though.
AS4 and AS2 respectively solve this in a way, because the receipt is part of the protocol and successful transmission. From what I understand(I might be wrong) its traditionally used for EDI in supply chain systems [2]. Drummond certifies that your product supports the standard correctly some people make a lot of money and you're good to go(it's XML and SOAP though). Apparently the EU is looking at using it.
Here's where the german bureaucracy ruins everything though. The law stated above mandates from what I understand(again IANAL) that you use DE-Mail for communication to flip the procedure stated above. DE-Mail requires the use of a trust center, a third party that receives the message and forwards it. The only other way to flip the evidence case is by using your own contract, which german lawyers avoid, because they might be liable in case something goes wrong.
Fax has a built-in transmission protocol and the receiver confirms that the transmission succeeded.
All bank transfers have to happen in 10 seconds or less.
I mean, arbitrarily picking whatever happens to be a popular comms protocol, with no regard to its functional validity, was how they got to SOAP in the first place.
Probably the only thing stopping them will be the byzantine budgetary processes that quasi civil services have.
They touted it as being innovative and open but in the end all Banks are required to open up when PSD2 comes into effect next year. Seeing this release, maybe they have honest intentions for being more open, but it being Deutsche i still have my doubts.