Pax-Bank für Kirche und Caritas API & Open Banking

Pax-Bank für Kirche und Caritas (BIC GENODED1PAX) is the cooperative bank serving churches, Caritas and Christian institutions across Germany. With open-banking.io you can reach both business and personal accounts held there through a single PSD2 connection — no eIDAS certificate, no bank-specific integration, and no raw credentials ever leaving your device.

open-banking.io is a zero-knowledge open-banking service covering 2,600+ banks in the EU and UK. Your account data is encrypted against a key generated on your own machine, so what reaches our servers stays as ciphertext only you can unlock.

How to connect Pax-Bank für Kirche und Caritas

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 created locally on your device at this moment.
  2. In the dashboard, pick Pax-Bank für Kirche und Caritas and choose the account type you need — business or personal.
  3. You are redirected to Pax-Bank's own secure login, where you approve access on the bank's PSD2 consent screen.
  4. Once approved, your selected accounts sync back into your dashboard automatically.

Pax-Bank grants consent for up to 180 days, after which you simply repeat the approval to keep the connection live.

Access your data

Reading the data programmatically is an optional developer step you take after the account is connected. On the Developers page, create an API key and export a credentials.json — this bundles the API key together with your private decryption key. From there you can use the CLI (openbanking accounts, openbanking transactions, openbanking sync), an SDK, or the REST API directly.

Every request carries your key in the X-Api-Key header, and every response is decrypted locally with your private key. Note that the CLI and SDK only read and sync connections that already exist — they cannot create one. And an API key alone returns nothing readable: without your private key you receive ciphertext only, which is exactly what keeps the service zero-knowledge.

All of this runs on the standard plan at roughly EUR 3 per month.

Does open-banking.io ever see my Pax-Bank data?

No. We hold only your public key, so account contents are decrypted solely on your device — never on our servers.

Do I need a certificate to connect Pax-Bank?

No. The service is certificate-free; consent is granted directly on Pax-Bank's own login screen.

Can I connect Pax-Bank from the CLI?

No. Connecting is done in the dashboard. The CLI and SDK only read or sync accounts you have already connected.

Ready to start? Visit open-banking.io.