Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin published a supervisory notice clarifying its expectations for the technical endpoint used to provide card-issuing payment service providers with confirmation of the availability of funds via dedicated account access interfaces, and how this should be reflected in account-servicing payment service providers’ quarterly interface statistics under Article 32(4) of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389. BaFin indicated that, until further notice, it will not object if account-servicing payment service providers do not offer a dedicated confirmation-of-funds endpoint for card issuers and do not include the related response-time metric in their published statistics. Under sections 45, 48 and 50 of the German Payment Services Supervision Act, account-servicing payment service providers must provide access to payment initiation service providers, account information service providers and card issuers, with card issuers’ access limited to obtaining confirmation of the availability of a specified amount on a payment account. Article 32(4) requires quarterly publication of performance statistics for the dedicated interface and the customer interface, split by access purpose, including confirmation of funds. BaFin’s supervisory approach reflects that it is not currently aware of any card issuer in Germany whose business model relies solely on this confirmation-of-funds endpoint. If a card issuer submits a confirmation-of-funds request under section 45, the account-servicing payment service provider must promptly inform it of existing access options and, if necessary, provide a technical endpoint without delay. BaFin noted that its expectations for the functionality, performance and availability of interfaces for payment initiation and account information services remain unchanged and referred to its 9 October 2024 supervisory notice for reporting channels for interface problems affecting those services.

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