OFX (Open Financial Exchange)

What it is

Open Financial Exchange is the standard most people meet as a .ofx, .qfx or .qbo file in their bank’s download menu. Microsoft, Intuit and CheckFree announced it on 16 January 1997, merging Microsoft’s Open Financial Connectivity with Intuit’s Open Exchange, and released version 1.0 on 14 February 1997. Versions 1.x use SGML; later versions use XML. The OFX consortium joined FDX in 2019, and the latest reference version, 2.3, was published on 16 October 2020. When checked on 2026-10-10, www.ofx.net served a parked domain page, a small sign of where the standard sits now.

How it works

OFX defines statement responses for bank, card and investment accounts: each transaction has a type, date, amount, name, memo and a FITID, the institution’s id for that transaction, and each statement carries a ledger balance as of a date. It works two ways. Direct Connect is a protocol: the client (Quicken, GnuCash, Moneydance) sends a signed-on request to the bank’s OFX server and gets the response back, with no third party in between. Web Connect is the file route: the person signs in to the bank’s site, downloads a QFX or OFX file and imports it. QFX is Intuit’s variant with proprietary extensions.

What it does well: it is structured, local, and carries a stable per-transaction id and a balance checkpoint, which is more than most CSV exports give.

Data and access

The format is free to read and has mature open-source parsers. ofxtools handles OFX 1.6 and 2.03, both SGML and XML, and QFX (ignoring Intuit’s tags), and its author reports more than 10 years of data from various institutions run through it. Many US banks support OFX import; most Canadian, UK and Australian banks do not offer Direct Connect but many offer OFX or QIF downloads. Direct Connect availability and fees vary bank by bank, and many banks have moved downloads behind aggregators such as Intuit’s own Express Web Connect (extent unverified).

Agents

There is nothing agent-specific, and nothing needs to be. A downloaded OFX file is one of the easiest bank sources for an agent: parse it, key each line by account and FITID, read the ledger balance, compare.

Customers

OFX’s users are people and small businesses on desktop money software, and the developers of importers for hledger, beancount and GnuCash. No review ratings apply.

History

OFX was the first serious attempt to standardise how banks hand data to software, a generation before open banking. Its successor in the US, the FDX API, is what Akoya and the CFPB’s 1033 rule build on. OFX solved the format and left the access problem to each bank, and many banks let Direct Connect lapse, which pushed users toward scraping aggregators.

For ownpurse

OFX is a source ownpurse can use now. Xero does not return bank statement lines through its public API, so the bank’s own file is the independent witness. ownpurse should store each file by SHA-256 in the drawer, project lines with FITID as the source id (scoped to the account, since uniqueness is only per account and some banks reuse or change them), record the ledger balance and its date as a balance fact to check against Xero, and replay on reimport without changing anything. Direct Connect is worth supporting only where a bank still offers it; the file path is the dependable one.