Hi,
we have the same situation in Europe where major changes to online banking access rules
("PSD2") only help third-party data handlers to access *your* banking data to "help
you optimize your finances" (or rather pull and sell your financial data).
To access your own data under the PSD2 rules you have to be licensed as some
kind of financial institute, impossible for the average private customer.
Some banks in DE already started ditching well established homebanking
protocols (HBCI, FinTS) over this (well, and of course to drop some of their
sh!tty smartphone apps on you).
That's not an oversight.
Regards,
Martin
Am 28.09.24 um 19:20 schrieb John Ralls:
You’re right that FDX locks out Free software. You’re wrong in thinking that
that’s in any way unintentional or that anyone in the big tech or banking
industries thinks that there should be any impediment to them selling your
personal data to whomever they want, including you. Heck, they even had to be
forced by laws to properly secure that data. It’s magical thinking to believe
that lobbying their industry organizations will cause them to change that
position, and politically it’s only the fringes in Congress (Sanders and Warren
come to mind) who’d consider legislating it.
Regards,
John Ralls
On Sep 28, 2024, at 03:11, Doherty, Daniel <d...@ddoherty.net> wrote:
Right, John, ofxhome.com <http://ofxhome.com/>. I was able to use this:
'https://www.ofxhome.com:443/api.php?dump=yes
<https://www.ofxhome.com/api.php?dump=yes>' to get a full site dump, which, for the
institutions I have been interacting with, worked quite well and my program was able to
fetch transactions from places like fidelity, etrade, commerce bank na, and a couple of
credit cards without a hitch. I run a cron job that fetches transactions every week or so
just to make sure I don't miss anything.
They still mostly work and, FDX notwithstanding, I expect that banks will keep
them working for the foreseeable future. But who knows?
I think making a user find, and then manually type in a complicated url is very
off-putting and it is an important feature to make this as automatic as
possible.
As for FDX, I would like to make my software work with it as well, but my
preliminary review of the materials indicates a few problems:
1. FDX assumes that the person interested in downloading the financial data is
some large third-party data vendor that can negotiate relationships with banks
on a one-at-a-time basis. It seems to make no provision for the owner of the
data to download his own data through its API mechanism. If I am understanding
it correctly, this seems to me a glaring oversight. Quicken can accommodate
its customers by acting as the third-party data provider for its customers, but
then they hold your data. It does not seem to have occurred to FDX that an
end-user may want to access his own data!
2. For the several institutions I have looked at, there is little or no
information about how to go about getting FDX access on their websites. The
assume that you will interface with the third-party data provider and they will
negotiate the relationship with the bank.
3. For GNUCash, more so than my own software, I think this should be a major
issue. They are essentially freezing out personal financial software from
operating with banks and brokers, again, if I am understanding it correctly.
If so, GNUCash should object loudly.
Is anyone at GNUCash petitioning FDX to advocate for access by bank customers
to their own data? I hope so, and if not, I hope you will.
I am just an amateur piker, but this accounting software has been my hobby
project for over 10 years, and I would like to make it useful to others in the
near future.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant. Just wanted to see what developers of
GNUCash thought about these issues.
Cheers John and Jesse,
====================================================
Daniel E. Doherty
d...@ddoherty.net <mailto:d...@ddoherty.net>
_______________________________________________
gnucash-devel mailing list
gnucash-devel@gnucash.org
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
--
"Things are only impossible until they're not"
_______________________________________________
gnucash-devel mailing list
gnucash-devel@gnucash.org
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
