Implement Auto OFX Statement Provider Configuration

Implement an automatic OFX statement provider configuration "wizard" plus online database to handle provider login and account configuration to avoid using the "Advanced" user interface.

Additional Information

Automatic configuration occurs in 2 phases. The first phase identifies a provider that can access the user's accounts. The second phase configures the user's accounts to use the provider.

The second phase is simple for providers that support the OFX "List Accounts" function. Those that don't will require simplified manual configuration to associate accounts with the provider.

The first phase is the most difficult. It needs to identify an optimum provider given a financial institution. The 1.0.5 configuration find provider button opens an independent public web site to let the user browse settings for different financial institutions, but automatic scraping of the web site would violate the terms of service for that site.

PalOMoney.com could put up a wiki page with financial institution settings, but it would be better if this could be hosted elsewhere for free. Perhaps Wikipedia might be able to do this. The wiki page would be formatted for human readers, and parsed by the software.

It would be helpful if the web site could be publicly editable, however, a opportunity exists for a hacker to edit the page to redirect sites to a malicious site, which could then steal a user's passwords. Accordingly, the site would have to be well protected.

I posted the following to the Ofx Home Forum. PalOMoney launches the Ofxhome web site so users can find their financial institution provider connection information. It is vital that the data be correct.

Here is the post (duplicate of OfxHome forum):

The Ofx Home Forum is getting spammed fairly heavily. I registered and marked several messages as "content spam." Perhaps it is time to update your anti-spam defenses. We had to at our site, and it has helped quite a bit. If you want to know what we did, send me an email, or register at our forum (below).

The reason this is important is that we make PalOMoney to restore online functionality to Microsoft Money, and are now referring our users to your site to obtain up to date OFX connection data. However, it is essential that the 1) OFX connection data is correct and can be trusted, and 2) that the forums remain active and uncluttered so issues can be reported and resolved.

If your site is still actively interested in providing this service to individuals, and can implement some security measures to protect the site and data, this would be great. Otherwise, our site would have to provide and maintain this data, which is a significant task.

PalOMoney is proprietary software. Currently, our "find" button just opens your site to the search page, which means the user has to search, cut, and paste. We hope that is acceptable use of your site, if not we will require the user to enter a similar URL to open on their own. We also are interested in integrating your API directly into our software. You would get full credit.

This is really the best if not only site for this data. Perhaps PalOMoney.com can provide some assistance in some way.

As another project, we would particularly like to develop a method to validate provider data from whatever source. If anyone has any ideas on how to do this, please respond to this post or register and post to our forums at the link above.

Another alternative might be to use an interface similar to Moneydance tying into their database which is updated often.