Kontist API Access & Open Banking Integration

Kontist is Germany's business-account service built for freelancers and the self-employed, and open-banking.io lets you reach that account data under PSD2 without handling eIDAS certificates or standing up your own bank integration. You sign up once, and open-banking.io covers 2,600+ EU and UK institutions — Kontist among them — for a flat fee of roughly EUR 3/month.

Kontist supports both business and personal account types, and a single approval grants a 180-day consent window before Kontist asks you to re-authorise. Kontist does not publish a public BIC, so account selection happens by name inside the dashboard rather than by routing code.

How to connect Kontist

Connecting happens entirely in the open-banking.io dashboard — there is no API call, key, or code involved in this step.

  1. Create an open-banking.io account and set an encryption passphrase. Your key pair is generated locally on your own device; open-banking.io only ever stores your public key.
  2. In the dashboard, search for Kontist and choose whether you're linking a business or personal account.
  3. You're redirected to Kontist's own secure login, where you approve access on their consent screen — your credentials are never seen by open-banking.io.
  4. Once approved, your Kontist accounts and transactions sync into your dashboard, ready to view.

Access your data

Reading Kontist data programmatically is an optional step you take after the connection exists. Open the Developers page, generate an API key, and export a credentials.json — this bundles the API key together with your private decryption key. From there use the CLI (openbanking accounts, openbanking transactions, openbanking sync), an SDK, or the REST API directly. Requests authenticate with the X-Api-Key header, and every response is decrypted locally with your own key. The API key alone only ever returns ciphertext.

Because open-banking.io is zero-knowledge, its servers hold your data encrypted and cannot read it — decryption belongs to you alone.

Can I connect Kontist using the CLI or SDK?

No. The CLI and SDK only read and sync connections that already exist. Linking Kontist always happens in the dashboard via Kontist's consent screen.

Does open-banking.io see my Kontist login or transactions?

No. You log in on Kontist's own site, and your data is stored encrypted under a key only you hold.

How long does my Kontist connection last?

Up to 180 days per consent. After that, Kontist requires you to re-approve access from the dashboard.

Ready to start? Head to open-banking.io.