[GNC] Aqbanking

[David Reiser]

I urge you not to try. But if you log into your bank and look for information on Quicken compatibility and it specifically says “QFX DirectConnect”, you have a chance. It may still be a challenge to find the connection information because Quicken and the bank don’t tell their tech support anything about it. For Quicken users, all that info is hidden inside Quicken. Banks will NEVER know anything about GnuCash, so it’s a bad idea to even mention it.

If your bank says it’s compatible with Express Web Connect (EWC) or Express Web Connect Plus (EWC+), then you are most likely out of luck.

Banks are abandoning DirectConnect almost as fast as they can. They’ve never liked it — first because in the early days Intuit had too much control of the standard and charged a _lot_ for their turnkey compatible software on the bank’s side, and now because its security features are not great.

The new 800-pound gorilla in finance data handling is FDX (presumably from Financial Data Exchange). FDX is an industry (i.e., banking industry) consortium focused on creating and maintaining standardized methods for financial data interchange among business partners. The OFX Group has become part of FDX. The intent of the combined group is to migrate everyone away from the OFX realm. The banking industry moves pretty slowly, so there will be a few stragglers offering DirectConnect for a few years.

The FDX API depends on software interacting with data aggregators (companies like Plaid) between consumer and bank. The complexity and cost of establishing credentials as an aggregator or even with an aggregation partner make it unlikely that open source software will ever be able to do direct retrieval of bank data again in the future.

Plan on downloading data from within your bank’s website, and then importing it into gnucash.

--
Dave Reiser
dbreiser at icloud.com





> On Apr 20, 2024, at 12:18, Dennis Powless <claven123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> How do I determine if my bank participates or offers ofx direct connect, aqbanking?
> 
> Dennis