Open Financial Exchange (OFX) is a
data-stream format for exchanging
financial
Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fina ...
information that evolved from
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
's
Open Financial Connectivity
Open Financial Exchange (OFX) is a data-stream format for exchanging financial information that evolved from Microsoft's Open Financial Connectivity (OFC) and Intuit's Open Exchange file formats.
History
Microsoft, Intuit and CheckFree announ ...
(OFC) and
Intuit
Intuit Inc. is an American business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparation application Tu ...
's Open Exchange file formats.
History
Microsoft, Intuit and
CheckFree
Fiserv, Inc. () is an American multinational company headquartered in Brookfield, Wisconsin that provides financial technology services to clients across the financial services sector, including: banks, thrifts, credit unions, securities broker ...
announced the OFX standard on 16 January 1997. The first OFX specification, version 1.0, was released on 14 February 1997. The specification allows for bank- and application-specific extensions, although only a subset is necessary to describe a financial transaction.
Versions 1.0 through 1.6 relied on
SGML
The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on two postulates":
* Declarative: Markup should des ...
for data exchange, but later versions are
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...
based. According to the main OFX site, "The specification is freely licensed, allowing any software developer to design an interface that will be supported on the front-end."
Support in various countries
Many banks in the US let customers use personal financial management software to automatically download their bank statements in OFX format, but most Canadian, United Kingdom and Australian banks do not allow this, however, many banks do support downloading financial data in OFX,
QFX,
QIF, or spreadsheet format via their web interface for later import into financial software.
Intuit and QFX
QFX is a proprietary variant of OFX used in Intuit's products. In Intuit products, OFX is used for Direct Connect and QFX for Web Connect. Direct Connect allows personal financial management software to connect directly to a bank OFX server, whereas in Web Connect, the user needs to log in and manually download a .qfx file and import it into Quicken.
See also
*
ISO 20022
ISO 20022 is an ISO standard for electronic data interchange between financial institutions. It describes a metadata repository containing descriptions of messages and business processes, and a maintenance process for the repository content. ...
*
FinTS (formerly HBCI)
References
External links
More information on the OFX specificationOFX Press Release(copy)
List of OFX connection details for banks that support OFXOFX forums, list of verified OFX connection details
{{accounting software
Computer file formats
Computer-related introductions in 1997
Financial software