# Open Financial Exchange

Canonical: https://web4.xpay.bi/en/wiki/wp-en-463149/

Language: en

Published: 2026-10-25T16:35:42.466Z

Updated: 2026-10-25T16:35:42.466Z

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.

## Key facts

## Overview

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 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 for data exchange, while later versions are XML-based. In 2019, the OFX consortium joined the Financial Data Exchange (FDX) consortium that now manages the OFX specification. The latest reference document was published on October 16, 2020.

## OFX Uses

Many United States banks let customers use personal financial management software to automatically import their bank transactions 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 logs in, manually downloads a .qfx file, and imports it into Quicken.

## See also

Quicken Interchange Format ISO 20022 FinTS (formerly HBCI)

## External links

OFX Press Release (copy) List of OFX connection details for banks that support OFX OFX forums, list of verified OFX connection details Archived 2008-07-24 at the Wayback Machine OFX file viewer

## Sources

- Open Financial Exchange · Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=463149

Source: Wikipedia contributors — https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=463149&oldid=1378889213

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Adaptation notice: Reformatted for XPay; the source may be abridged, restructured or translated. Consult the cited revision for the original.