EBICS Connects Directly to French Banks Without an Aggregator. Your Software Probably Doesn't Support It.
You've gotten the notification: "Your bank connection needs to be renewed." You clicked through. Re-authenticated. Waited for the redirects. Confirmed the connection. And wondered why you have to do this again.
Every 90 days. For as long as you use accounting software with automatic bank import.
This is PSD2 — the EU directive (Payment Services Directive 2) that lets third-party software access your bank account data with your permission. The 90-day re-authentication is a legal requirement under EU Strong Customer Authentication rules, originally designed to protect consumers from unauthorized ongoing access to their current accounts. Your business bank account, managed professionally, is treated identically to a consumer checking account. No distinction made.
There is a protocol that doesn't work this way. Your bank has supported it for 20 years. Most of the accounting software sold to small businesses doesn't connect to it.
---
The Connection That Never Expires
EBICS — Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard — is a direct protocol between your bank and your accounting software. No third-party aggregator in the middle. No 90-day countdown. No reconnection notification.
You set it up once, through a conversation with your bank's business banking team. After that, your bank sends your statements directly to Liberté every morning — automatically, on a schedule, with no re-authentication ever required.
All major French banks support EBICS for business accounts: BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, CIC, Crédit Mutuel, La Banque Postale, Caisse d'Épargne, Banque Populaire. This is the same protocol that corporate treasury departments across France and Germany have used for two decades to manage cash flows across multiple banks. The protocol that handles hundreds of millions of euros in daily transactions is available to a plumbing business with a single Crédit Agricole account. The protocol was always there. The software that made it accessible to small businesses wasn't.
---
What the 90-Day Notification Is Actually About
PSD2 was designed for consumer fintech — apps that show all your bank accounts in one place, track your spending, or help you apply for credit. The 90-day re-authentication rule made sense for that world: if an app you downloaded two years ago still had silent access to your current account, you'd want a periodic check-in.
Applied to business accounting software, the rule creates a quarterly maintenance task that breaks your automatic bank reconciliation when you're distracted, on holiday, or in the middle of closing your accounts.
The aggregator in the middle of PSD2 connectivity isn't a bug — it's the design. A platform like Powens connects 1,800+ banks through a single API. Your accounting software can claim compatibility with almost any French bank without building individual integrations for each one. That development shortcut serves the software vendor. The trade-off is yours: an aggregator in the data flow, a 90-day expiry clock, and a copy of your transaction history sitting on a third-party server whose terms of service you accepted in under 60 seconds.
Most business owners using PSD2 bank feeds have never read those terms. They typically allow the aggregator to use aggregated, anonymized transaction data for their own analytics. Your supplier payment patterns. Your cash flow cycles. Your client payment timing. Anonymized, yes — and the aggregator's data asset as much as yours. EBICS involves no aggregator and no such terms. Your bank data goes from your bank to Liberté and nowhere else.
Your bank reconnects via PSD2 every 90 days. EBICS never breaks — because it's a direct line to the bank, not a third-party connection the bank tolerates.
---
When PSD2 Connectivity Breaks
Most of the time, PSD2 works. You get your transactions, your reconciliation runs, and the notification is an annoyance you handle.
The problem appears at the edges.
Your bank feed expires at the end of a busy month. The notification arrives on a Thursday when you're in the middle of a client project. You make a note to handle it Friday. Friday doesn't go as planned. You manage it the following Monday. Three working days of transactions didn't import. You re-authenticate, the feed resumes, and you have a choice: manually re-enter the missing transactions, or live with a gap.
If you receive a tax audit notice and need to produce your FEC — the standardized accounting file (Fichier des Écritures Comptables) that French tax authorities can demand with just 15 days' notice — that gap is not abstract. Failure to produce a complete FEC means a minimum €5,000 penalty. A reconciliation gap from a three-day bank feed failure is a missing entry, a compliance risk, a reason the audit takes longer.
EBICS doesn't have feed failures. Your bank sends CAMT.053 files — the standardized format for bank account statements — directly to Liberté every morning. Day 90, day 91, day 180: same automated delivery, same completeness. No countdown. No gap.
---
Why Most SMB Software Chose PSD2
Implementing EBICS requires per-bank integration work: separate negotiations with BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole — each with its own technical specifications. Building and maintaining those connections over time.
PSD2 aggregators offer a different architecture: one API to Powens, instant access to 1,800+ banks. For a software team building on a budget, the development economics are clear.
The result: Sage includes EBICS in their enterprise tiers, available to larger businesses, not to the small business accounts sold at €80-200 per month. Pennylane connects via PSD2. Most starter accounting platforms connect via PSD2 only.
Building EBICS connections took per-bank engineering work. The decision to make that investment came down to this: the businesses most hurt by connectivity failures are the ones without a finance team monitoring feed status. A corporate treasury catches a broken bank feed in hours. A restaurant owner in Lyon catches it when the end-of-quarter reconciliation shows a three-week gap.
---
Two Protocols, One Platform
PSD2 is not the wrong choice for every business. For challenger banks — Qonto, Shine, N26 — that don't offer EBICS to small business accounts, PSD2 is the practical option. For the broadest possible bank coverage across all account types, the aggregator model makes sense.
Both protocols are supported in Liberté. When you connect your bank, the platform uses EBICS where your bank offers it and falls back to PSD2 where it doesn't. The right connection for your specific bank is applied automatically.
EBICS also enables payment initiation — you can send SEPA credit transfers (SEPA, the Single Euro Payments Area system, is the standard for all bank transfers within Europe) and process payroll directly from Liberté without logging into your bank's interface. One fewer portal to navigate. One fewer login to maintain every week.
---
2027 and the Last Manual Link
Three things converge for French business banking over the next two years.
Chorus Pro e-invoicing becomes mandatory for B2B transactions in 2026-2027, meaning structured invoice data arrives at the DGFiP (Direction Générale des Finances Publiques — France's tax authority) automatically. SEPA instant payments continue to expand, creating more real-time cash flow events to reconcile daily. And EBICS 3.0, the current protocol version, carries richer payment data across the connection.
With EBICS-connected accounting: invoices arrive at the DGFiP automatically, bank statements arrive in Liberté automatically, and reconciliation between them approaches automation. The last manual link in the accounting chain closes.
For businesses reconciling 90-day PSD2 batches when the connection works: the gap between invoice data and bank data stays manual — and quarterly re-authentication stays on the calendar.
Your bank has supported EBICS for decades. The protocol was built for exactly this: a business account, managed professionally, needing reliable daily statement delivery for accounting purposes. The free platform that brings EBICS to small business accounts alongside PSD2 — that's what Liberté is.
If you bank at BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, CIC, Caisse d'Épargne, or Banque Populaire — the connection that never expires is ready when you are.