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KONTOPRUEF-Navigation: |
English Abstract about KONTOPRUEFContents of this page:
Benefit of Bank Account VerifyingKONTOPRUEF is a system for verifying German bank account numbers and German addresses. The benefit of verifying bank account numbers is to avoid typos and/or real errors when customers enter their checking account number for example into a web form in order to let the merchant charge their checking account for some purchase. Frequent errors include, for example, 7601085 as bank routing code instead of 76010085, or 731495 instead of 734195 as account number, or 100003791 instead of 1000003791, and so on. Because the merchant does not know the correct account data of the customer, he must believe in the correctness of the data. Some days after charging the customer's account, the merchant receives a chargeback from the customer's bank, along with chargeback fees. If the merchant had verified the account data before charging the customer's account, the chargeback (and paying the fees) would have never happened! How does it work?Of course, the KONTOPRUEF system does not know all bank account numbers of all customers. However, this is not necessary. German bank accounts consist of two parts: the Bankleitzahl (abbr. Blz, the bank routing code) and the Kontonummer (abbr. Kto, the account number). With this information, bank data can be verified as follows:
As you can see, KONTOPRUEF only verifies that a given bank account is just possible. But it has turned out that this is good enough to reduce chargebacks, caused be erroneous customer inputs, by 90%! KONTOPRUEF especially helps when used "early" in order processing. If you have a webshop, don't let your customer click on the "Submit Order" button as long as his bank data is wrong. Or, if you have a call center, install KONTOPRUEF directly into the agent's order software. Which version to choose?KONTOPRUEF comes with three different versions:
The capabilities of the different versions are:
* Only if you additionally subscribe to quarterly delivery of the postal data CDROM from the Deutsche Post AG. Technical InformationIn this chapter, you get some information about how to implement KONTOPRUEF into your own software. Most of the links lead to German web pages (sorry for that), but since most procedure, variable, and parameter names in the software are English anyway, you should not get too much comprehension problems. If you have any questions, just send an e-mail to support@kontopruef.de. Please note that the names of the procedures, functions and so on are KTOPRUEF instead of KONTOPRUEF – this has historical reasons: The first version of KONTOPRUEF was developped when MSDOS was the most common operating system, and the filenames in MSDOS had a maximum length of "8.3" characters; so, for example, KONTOPRUEF.EXE would have been too long for a filename... There are two ways to access the bank account verifying server: by WDDX and as a WebService. Both ways work with a simple HTTP(S) request – so you can generally use the KONTOPRUEF online version even behind a proxy server and/or a firewall. WDDXWDDX ("Web Distributed Data Exchange") is a mechanism where the request parameters are encoded directly into the URL, and the result is returned as a (pretty simple) XML page. To get the result, you can use one of the commonly available XML parsers, but a WDDX XML page is really so simple that you can extract the results even with some normal string operations. See the Wikipedia entry for more information about WDDX. Example: Let's test the (demo) bank routing code 89999999 together with the (demo) account number 1234. You construct the following URL: http://wddx.hanft.de/ktopruef?un=demo&pw=demo&blz=89999999&kto=1234&c=de or, using SSL, this one: https://wddx.hanft.de/ktopruef?un=demo&pw=demo&blz=89999999&kto=1234&c=de and get the following XML page as result from the server: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO-8859-1'?> <!DOCTYPE wddxPacket SYSTEM 'wddx_0100.dtd'> <wddxPacket version='1.0'> <header/> <data> <struct> <var name='result'><string>0</string></var> <var name='resulttext'><string>Ok</string></var> <var name='bankname'><string>Demo-Bank</string></var> <var name='newblz'><string></string></var> <var name='iban'><string>DE00123456781234567890</string></var> <var name='bic'><string>DEMODEFF000</string></var> </struct> </data> </wddxPacket> As you can see, if you do not use an XML parser, you just have to look for the variable names and extract their content. The complete list of procedures, functions, parameters and results can be found in the documentation for bank account testing and in the documentation for address testing. Of course, there are already some "little helpers" for WDDX so that you do not need to reinvent the wheel:
WebService/SOAPIn addition to the WDDX interface, you can also use KONTOPRUEF's functions as a WebService. The overview of the functions and the links to the WSDLs can be found at webservices.hanft.de (please note: importing the WSDLs with SSL automatically generates WSDLs with SSL WebService addresses). WebService access should be implemented in your application development system; a step-by-step example for VB.NET can be found here. If you want to do it manually "from the command line" without Visual Studio, you can follow these instructions:
Testing and DemosTo check if KONTOPRUEF-ONLINE works with your application software, there are many testing possibilities without any purchase or inquiry. In demo mode (username and password are demo), the online server does not operate on real data. Instead, you can do some experiments with the bank routing code 89999999 (which does not exist in real life). An even account number (for example, 1234) generates the result 0/Ok; whereas an odd account number (for example, 1235) generates the result 13/Check digit wrong. You can try this by the following WDDX URLs (the first comes with an even account number, the second with an odd one): http://wddx.hanft.de/ktopruef?un=demo&pw=demo&blz=89999999&kto=1234&c=de http://wddx.hanft.de/ktopruef?un=demo&pw=demo&blz=89999999&kto=1235&c=de (You should get the same results when using WebService instead of WDDX.) OrderingTo get access to the KONTOPRUEF-ONLINE server, you can fill out the registration form directly on the screen and send it to me by mail or fax. As soon as I have received the form, you will get username and password for the server by e-mail. Response to your registration is guaranteed within 24 hours; however, in reality, this goes much faster. If you send the registration form by fax, it will generally take just 10 minutes to process your order and to supply your username and password!
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