Kreissparkasse Köln API Access & Open Banking Data

Kreissparkasse Köln is one of the largest savings banks in the Rhineland, serving the Rhein-Erft, Rheinisch-Bergisch and Oberberg districts around Cologne. If you hold a business or personal account there (BIC COKSDE33XXX), open-banking.io lets you pull balances and transaction history into one dashboard — and, when you want it, into your own code — without handshaking with certificates or eIDAS credentials.

open-banking.io is a zero-knowledge open-banking service covering 2,600+ EU/UK banks. Your data is encrypted and only ever decrypted on your own device with a key nobody else holds — not even our servers, which only ever see your public key.

How to connect Kreissparkasse Köln

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

  1. Sign up for open-banking.io and set your encryption passphrase. Your keys are generated locally on your device.
  2. In the dashboard, search for Kreissparkasse Köln and choose your account type — business or personal.
  3. You are redirected to Kreissparkasse Köln's own secure login, where you approve access under PSD2. Consent lasts up to 180 days before you renew it.
  4. Your accounts sync back into the dashboard, ready to view.

Because approval takes place on the bank's own consent screen, open-banking.io never sees your Kreissparkasse Köln credentials.

Access your data

Want to read your Kreissparkasse Köln data programmatically? That's an optional developer step after connecting. On the Developers page, create an API key and export a credentials.json — it bundles the API key and your private decryption key. Then use the CLI (openbanking accounts, openbanking transactions, openbanking sync), an SDK, or the REST API. Requests authenticate with the X-Api-Key header, and every response is decrypted locally with your key. An API key on its own only returns ciphertext.

All of this runs at roughly EUR 3/month.

Do I need eIDAS certificates?

No. open-banking.io is certificate-free — you approve access directly on Kreissparkasse Köln's login and skip the regulatory certificate setup entirely.

Can the CLI connect my Kreissparkasse Köln account?

No. The CLI, SDK and API only read and sync connections you've already made in the dashboard. Connecting is always done through the bank's consent screen.

Can open-banking.io staff see my transactions?

No. It's zero-knowledge — we hold only your public key, so decryption happens solely on your device.

Start at https://open-banking.io.