Open Financial Exchange (OFX) is a
data-stream format for exchanging
financial
Finance refers to monetary resources and to the study and Academic discipline, discipline of money, currency, assets and Liability (financial accounting), liabilities. As a subject of study, is a field of Business administration, Business Admin ...
information that evolved from
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
's
Open Financial Connectivity
Open Financial Exchange (OFX) is a data-stream format for exchanging financial information that evolved from Microsoft's Open Financial Connectivity (OFC) and Intuit's Open Exchange file formats.
History
Microsoft, Intuit and CheckFree announ ...
(OFC) and
Intuit
Intuit Inc. is an American multinational business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparati ...
's Open Exchange file formats.
History
Microsoft, Intuit and
CheckFree announced the OFX standard on 16 January 1997. The first OFX specification, version 1.0, was released on 14 February 1997.
The specification allows for bank- and application-specific extensions, although only a subset is necessary to describe a financial transaction.
Versions 1.0 through 1.6 relied on
SGML
The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; International Organization for Standardization, ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on t ...
for data exchange, but later versions are
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...
based. In 2019, the OFX consortium joined the Financial Data Exchange (FDX) consortium that now manages the OFX specification.
The latest reference
document
A document is a writing, written, drawing, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of nonfiction, non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ', which denotes ...
was published in October 2020.
OFX Uses
Many United States banks let customers use personal financial management software to automatically import their bank transaction using the OFX protocol. However, most Canadian, United Kingdom and Australian banks do not allow this. Nonetheless, many banks do support downloading financial data in the
OFX file format, the
QIF file format, or the spreadsheet format via their web interface. The resulting file may be imported into financial software.
Intuit and QFX
QFX is a proprietary variant of OFX used in Intuit's products. In Intuit products, OFX is used for Direct Connect and QFX for Web Connect. Direct Connect allows personal financial management software to connect directly to a bank's OFX server. With Web Connect, the user needs to log in and manually download a .qfx file and import it into Quicken.
See also
*
Quicken Interchange Format
*
ISO 20022
*
FinTS (formerly HBCI)
References
External links
More information on the OFX specificationOFX Press Release(copy)
List of OFX connection details for banks that support OFXOFX forums, list of verified OFX connection details
{{accounting software
Computer file formats
Computer-related introductions in 1997
Financial software