[GNC] OFX Home Sunset Announcement

[John Ralls]

> On Apr 25, 2021, at 4:59 PM, Jim DeLaHunt <list+gnucash at jdlh.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2021-04-25 14:02, Derek Atkins wrote:
> 
>> Is this something we should take over?
>> 
>> -derek
>> 
>> On Sun, April 25, 2021 3:34 pm, John Ralls wrote:
>>> I happened to be on https://ofxhome.com today and noticed that the owner
>>> had posted this on 28 February:
>>> 
>>>> Beginning in August of 2021 (6 months from now) OFX Home will go read
>>>> only. In February of 2022 (one year from now) I will shut down OFX Home
>>>> completely.
>>>> I have kept the site limping along but I haven't done any work on it in
>>>> years. I think there are a lot of really cool things that could be done
>>>> with it. But sadly I am not the person to do it.
>>>> If you are interested in taking over the site, please read me post here:
>>>> http://www.ofxhome.com/ofxforum/viewtopic.php?id=49812
>>>> Thanks for reading.
>>> Another nail...
> 
> 
> I hate to see accumulations of knowledge like this taken down entirely. That apparently is the current admin's intention for Feb 2022.
> 
> It looks like the current admin has been looking for a successor since 2019, and no volunteer has worked out. Part of me agrees with Derek Atkins. I think that this is a great opportunity for someone from this community, or from AqBanking, to step forward, become the successor, preserve the knowledge, and even move it forward. Ideally, that is someone who isn't already giving their full capacity to Gnucash proper. That way it becomes a stimulus to grow capacity.
> 
> On the other hand, part of me thinks David Carlson has a great point. How valuable is the knowledge in OFX Home now, and will that value likely decay regardless? The system-to-system connection protocol (OFX DirectConnect is the name for this?) relies on banks supporting it, and on client software using it, and the banks valuing the clients which use it. It looks like Intuit is moving Quicken to its own proprietary protocol, Microsoft Money has been abandoned for over 10 years, and we other client software are not valued by the banks. Thus, I have to imagine that bank support for OFX DirectConnect may well dry up. So why bother?
> 
> It would help to know how many GnuCash and other users get value from using OFX DirectConnect now, and whether that number is growing or shrinking. (I used to use it, for one of maybe 20 financial institutions, but I no longer do.)
> 
> It would help to know many institutions support OFX DirectConnect, and how fast that number is declining.
> 
> It would help to have ideas on how continuing OFXHome, or doing new things, would create value for our community.
> 
> I don't have good ideas for that.  What do you all think?
> 
>       —Jim DeLaHunt, Vancouver, Canada

I can answer a couple of those questions. Ofxhome makes it possible to query statistics and I did a few months ago: There are about 2100 entries total in the database and of those around 1400 still passed the daily connectivity test back in December. I didn't retrieve the dates of the last success to plot the rate of decline, and it's possible that some of the 700-ish failed tests are because the bank changed something and nobody bothered to tell ofxhome about it.

At least one bank, USAA, offers OFX Direct Connect as the only way to retrieve tagged financial data; their only alternative is a CSV download from the website. Many other banks allow downloads of OFX/QFX and QIF from their websites. That's not quite as convenient as OFX direct connect but it's more reliable than CSV. Enough GnuCash users use USAA that it generated a fair amount of traffic in January when they changed their authentication and temporarily broke AQBanking download. (For those who don't know USAA, a.k.a the United Services Automobile Association, is a mutual insurance company whose members are current and former members of the US armed forces and their children; it offers banking and credit card services as well as insurance).

Regards,
John Ralls