Chase Credit Card Services changes

[Alton Brantley]

I have been regularly downloading from Chase the OFX/QFX files for my credit cards and then importing them without difficulty (except one; more on that shortly).
For this month, I got mostly gibberish on the import screen— nothing in the Description field and “null”(the text word) in the Memo field. So I changed the name of the OFX file to “import.txt” and read through it, and I found two particular changes.
1. There is a tag “<CATEGORY>” with no value. I searched both OFX 2.1.1 standard and the new OFX 2.2 standard for review and didn’t see that anywhere.
2. There is a tag and field “<MEMO>null” in each transaction.

Since I don’t want to have useless text in my file, I removed all the <MEMO>null lines and reran the import and still had no descriptions.
Then, I deleted all the “<CATEGORY>” lines, reran the import, and it worked as usual.

So, CHASE is changing the OFX download file content, and the change is affecting the OFX importing.
I believe that the “<MEMO>null” overrides OFX import of copying the Description field into the Memo field. Chase should have had “<MEMO>” with no text in the field.
I also believe that the unrecognized “<CATEGORY>” tag is causing the OFX import to put nothing in the Description field from the “<NAME>” tag so that there can be no matching of the values. In XML, when an unrecognized tag is encountered, it should just be ignored.

I have reported these to Chase to see if they can provide further information.

Finally, it is most irritating to me to have the printed credit card statement using <DTUSER> value but not including it in the OFX download file. Then, we could add the option to use <DTUSER> instead of <DTPOSTED> on statement imports. I have also asked Chase to consider including that data as well in the OFX download file.