Open Financial Exchange (OFX) Banking API

Question

Hi,

First of all I apologize if this question is asked before.

I am planning to develop a small application which displays my bank account details(like Mint.com) where I can customize the display of my own. I want to know how and where to start.

1. Where these OFX API's are available?
2. Are they free or we need to pay and get access to those API?
3. What is data format ( xml, xml/atom, json) ?
4. Any article or document to understand this requirement and start developing?
5. Any open source software where I can download the code and customize it?

FYI : I am working on C#.Net.

Any help would be appreciated.

Edit :

Mark : Thanks for you info. If I want to develop a application like Mint.com what are the other companies provide API's other than Yoodlee? Also any idea on the pricing?

Thanks Gabriel Susai

Answer 1

OFX is an XML format. You can use the schema from the OFX site to generate a strongly-typed dataset.

Answer 2

It sounds like you want to do an account aggregation application. If that is the case I would recommend looking into an existing service that would handle the task of account aggregation and all you would need to do is call into their API to gather the pre-aggregated data.

Yodlee is actually want Mint.com uses for account aggregation

Granted if this is going to be your own personal application yodlee will be not an option for you.

Answer 3

I'm not sure what Yodlee's latest pricing on their SDK is (http://yodlee.com/solutions_dv_pfmsdk.shtml) but another data provider is CashEdge AllData. They were just recently used by HelloWallet.com (a service similar to Mint): http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3700584.htm

I definitely know that Yodlee is the leader in the space when it comes to # of users, # of institutions supported, etc.