George can now display accounts held at other banks

Multi-banking for retail customers

Erste Bank and Sparkassen is the first bank in Austria to offer its customers the option of connecting to savings and current accounts they have at other banks through its internet banking platform “George”. “This is a major step for our customers. Almost one-third of Austrians have accounts at two or more banks– this is more than two million persons,” stressed Thomas Schaufler, the management board member at Erste Bank Oesterreich responsible for private customers. George thus offers customers a complete overview of their finances, including their savings and current accounts at other banks. In the course of the next year, it will also become possible to transfer funds through these third-party accounts and to integrate other products such as securities accounts. The new plug-in “George Multi-banking” is free of charge for all customers of the savings bank group. The customer simply uses the plug-in within George to log into the other internet bank accounts using the access data for them; the data for these accounts is then transferred to George. Currently, this works for all current accounts at Raiffeisen, Bank Austria, ING, Volksbank, Bawag, Easy Bank and Hypo NÖ. Work is in progress to enlarge that list of accessible banks. George’s usual functions can be used for third party accounts. This means, for example, that transactions can be automatically categorised, a profile image assigned to the account, or invoices uploaded to individual transactions.