OFX: Open Financial Exchange

Focus: Payments and Funds Transfer

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Website: www.ofx.net

Contact: ofxinfo@ofx.net

Founding & Key Members:

  • Bank of America
  • Charles Schwab
  • Chase Manhattan Bank
  • Citibank
  • Dean Witter
  • Fidelity Investments
  • First Technology Credit Union
  • Home Financial Network
  • KeyBank
  • Wells Fargo
  • Woodforest National Bank
  • Vertigo

Organization: OFX has a number of steering committees to represent different aspects of the financial industry, including a banking, brokerage, insurance companies, client software and bill presentment. It also plans to form steering committees to support the interests of server vendors, service bureaus and the international online financial services community.

Background: The Open Financial Exchange (OFX) is a specification for exchanging financial data between financial institutions and consumers. It is primarily focused on the retail end of the market.

OFX was created in early 1997 by CheckFree, Intuit and Microsoft, to support a range of financial activities from bill payment, presentation to investments in stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Other financial services, including financial planning and insurance, will be added in the future and will be incorporated into the specification.

It enables XML-based communication of financial data for users of transactional web sites, thin clients and personal financial software. It is hoped that adoption of this standard will encourage the adoption of online banking and financial services.

Using OFX, financial institutions can offer customers the ability to perform a variety of banking transactions online, such as retrieving statements or transferring funds for checking, savings, money market, credit card and line of credit accounts.

For investment accounts, OFX supports download of information including transactions, positions at a brokerage, balances and open orders.

Several technology providers are adopting OFX, including EDS, Logica, Microsoft and Sun Online Resources.

The protocol itself is an Internet-oriented client/server system that features a direct connection between the client and a financial institution's server, employing a request/response model. It features full data synchronization, error recovery and incorporates security technology, including transport level Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) v.3.

OFX has been compared with FIX and its FIXML initiative (see links below), but OFX’s focus on the retail market differs from FIX’s institutional business focus.

See Also:
FIXML