Online Banking APPVER/APPID

[David Reiser]

On Mar 9, 2009, at 11:51 PM, Dennis Muhlestein wrote:

> I got a notice from my bank saying I was using Quicken 2006 and they
> were no longer going to support that.  Under expert settings in the  
> OFX
> setup, I added APPID: QWIN APPVER 1600 to mimic Quicken 2007.  Does
> anybody know any other issues that might come up?  I'm assuming OFX is
> OFX and if AqBanking supports OFX 102 then it ought to work regardless
> of whether or not my bank knows if I'm using a "supported" app or not.
>
> -Dennis


Their 'version unsupported' claim could just mean they are mimicking  
Intuit's approach to disallow versions more than 2 years old. It could  
also mean that they are going to insist that the ofx clients support  
additional authentication (they claim it is multifactor  
authentication, but it is really just another password-like token).

aqbanking4 (not quite released yet, it's at release candidate 4) will  
support CLIENTUID for ofx connections. I've seen one report that just  
putting in a uuid there is enough to satisfy the new scheme of  
authentication. None of my financial institutions use the CLIENTUID  
field yet, so I haven't had to experiment.

The unix command 'uuidgen' creates a uid that matches the length and  
punctuation of the CLIENTUID shown in the examples of the recent OFX  
specs.

You should be able to use the same uid for all bank connections from  
your computer because the uid is supposed to uniquely identify a  
specific instance of the client software, not necessarily identify  
you. Once you successfully connect with a bank that requires  
CLIENTUID, changing the CLIENTUID may take a call to your bank to get  
them to reset it. That will make it hard to use Quicken and then  
gnucash.

Dave
--
David Reiser
dbreiser at earthlink.net