[prplhaz4]

The finance industry mainly uses OFX as the standard for online access to statements/transaction downloads (as does quicken, QuickBooks and gnucash...etc). Some banks do not support it and others go through aggregators to provide access.

You are doing people a huge disservice by identifying the companies you listed as "the finance industry". They are scraping data (in most cases against TOS) and exposing it as a paid API service.

It's a terrible state of affairs that easy access to ownership of this critical data is so hard to come by and has essentially forced people to give up their most valuable credentials to in a lot of cases unknown or untrustworthy parties.

At least mint has partnered with some banks that actually provide supported APIs for transaction data (Chase), but that is so far from the norm right now it makes me queasy.

[SmirkingRevenge]

Quicken asks me for my login credentials to my bank and in their policies, says they store my credentials in their infrastructure. How does QFX actually help here?

[prplhaz4]

Again, it's dependent on your bank's support. OFX helps by not requiring remote storage of your online banking credentials.

Direct Connect - Your customer ID and password are not stored on Quicken servers. If you choose to use the Quicken Password Vault, we encrypt them on your computer's hard drive.

Express/Quicken Connect - Your login credentials are stored on Quicken-hosted servers. This makes updates faster for you.

https://www.quicken.com/support/how-quicken-connects-your-ba...

[sbmthakur]

I work for a US based aggregator and it's terribly hard to get direct API connectivity with Financial Institutions. Only big banks like Chase, Wells Fargo provide it and even then you need good business relationship to get them on board.