HBCI was originally designed by Germany's three banking "pillar" networks, namely the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, German Cooperative Financial Group, and Association of German Banks.
The standardisation effort was necessary to replace the huge number of deprecated homemade software clients and servers (some of them still using BTX emulation).
While IFX (Interactive Financial Exchange), OFX (Open Financial Exchange) and SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) are tailored for the North American market, HBCI is designed to meet the requirements of the European market.
The FinTS-specification is publicly available on a website run by the ZKA (Central Credit Committee).
Further, the number of roundtrips necessary was reduced, allowing asynchronous communication (e.g. via SMTP) for simple transaction dialogues.