Is OFXHome Permanently Dead?

[Doherty, Daniel]

Right, John, ofxhome.com.  I was able to use this: '
https://www.ofxhome.com:443/api.php?dump=yes' to get a full site dump,
which, for the institutions I have been interacting with, worked quite well
and my program was able to fetch transactions from places like fidelity,
etrade, commerce bank na, and a couple of credit cards without a hitch.  I
run a cron job that fetches transactions every week or so just to make sure
I don't miss anything.

They still mostly work and, FDX notwithstanding, I expect that banks will
keep them working for the foreseeable future.  But who knows?

I think making a user find, and then manually type in a complicated url is
very off-putting and it is an important feature to make this as automatic
as possible.

As for FDX, I would like to make my software work with it as well, but my
preliminary review of the materials indicates a few problems:

1.  FDX assumes that the person interested in downloading the financial
data is some large third-party data vendor that can negotiate relationships
with banks on a one-at-a-time basis.  It seems to make no provision for the
owner of the data to download his own data through its API mechanism.  If I
am understanding it correctly, this seems to me a glaring oversight.
Quicken can accommodate its customers by acting as the third-party data
provider for its customers, but then they hold your data.  It does not seem
to have occurred to FDX that an end-user may want to access his own data!

2.  For the several institutions I have looked at, there is little or no
information about how to go about getting FDX access on their websites.
The assume that you will interface with the third-party data provider and
they will negotiate the relationship with the bank.

3.  For GNUCash, more so than my own software, I think this should be a
major issue.  They are essentially freezing out personal financial software
from operating with banks and brokers, again, if I am understanding it
correctly.  If so, GNUCash should object loudly.

Is anyone at GNUCash petitioning FDX to advocate for access by bank
customers to their own data?  I hope so, and if not, I hope you will.

I am just an amateur piker, but this accounting software has been my hobby
project for over 10 years, and I would like to make it useful to others in
the near future.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant.  Just wanted to see what
developers of GNUCash thought about these issues.

Cheers John and Jesse,


====================================================
Daniel E. Doherty
ded at ddoherty.net
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