The objectives of the EBICS SC are to maintain and further develop the standard according to the market requirements of participating countries and to extend the use of EBICS to other European countries. Further topics are the harmonization of transactions, electronic authentication and customer-to-bank communication standards.

A European ambition - EBICS is the answer to Eurosystem SEPA expectations:

• From chapter 1.3 of the 6th ECB Progress Report: “The SEPA payment instruments ensure that euro payments between any two payment accounts within SEPA are processed smoothly and without manual intervention. This is commonly referred to as straight-through-processing (STP)... This requires that the SEPA payment instruments allow any customer to initiate a payment electronically and receive electronic confirmation once the payment is settled.”
• EBICS is an important element of E-SEPA
• To reach this goal we need an interoperable communication standard able to exchange common ISO 20022 formats and to transfer messages securely from customers to banks. EBICS meets these requirements.