Interoperablity of bank statements: A case study

There are different types of bank statements offered by various banks. So far there are no standards, and each bank builds its own type of statements. Most of these statements given to the citizens are in pdf format, and lately several banks offer statements in excel formats. Very rarely one can find XML types of statements, which can be further processed. To use data from statements in other applications, one has to build their own interpreter of bank statements. To solve the existing problem with interoperability, as a main motivation for this paper, we introduce an adapter, which can read various types of statements and return an XML file as output. Our realization of the adapter works with statements offered by most of the banks in our country as a proof of concept. The adapter was efficiently used in a special program for analysis of consumer costs, where one can access accounts in several banks and calculate taxes, income statements and analyze the costs.