In an important step toward establishing a single interoperable industry standard for financial data sharing, the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) will join the Financial Data Exchange (FDX) effective immediately.

With this milestone, the industry continues to align around the FDX standards, which spell out how consumer-permissioned financial data is securely shared, and clarifies the security and authentication protocol requirements for financial institutions and fintechs.

“We are delighted to welcome our colleagues from OFX into the Financial Data Exchange as a full-fledged working group,” said Don Cardinal, managing director of FDX. “The customers we all serve are seeking a secure, transparent and easy–to–use way to get the most out of their data. This collaboration is the logical next step in the industry transformation that FDX has been leading since its inception.”

Moving forward, the shared goal is for FDX to be capable of supporting many of the use cases currently supported by OFX. This agreement means that the two organizations will co-exist with greater communications and cross-pollination so that, over time, more features will be standardized between OFX and FDX.

Advertisement

“For more than 20 years, OFX has worked diligently to drive industry standards in the critical area of financial data and security,” said Olivier Helleboid, vice president of product and engineering in the Financial Data Services unit at Intuit. “As a founding partner of both the OFX and FDX, Intuit believes that this new alignment will help us drive toward a unified standard that will support and benefit consumers, financial institutions and fintech organizations around the world.”

OFX was established in 1997 by Intuit (the maker of TurboTax, QuickBooks and Mint), Microsoft and CheckFree (now part of Fiserv) as a data specification around open transfers. By 2015, OFX was in use by over 7,000 institutions. Moving to FDX, OFX will continue to provide full-featured functionality even as the two organizations move jointly towards an industrywide standard under FDX.

“Leaders of FDX and OFX have pledged to focus on the highest standards of collaboration,” said Cardinal. “This is what the industry wants, and this is what consumers demand as we continue to evolve to support rapid technological advancements.”

“We’re excited to see these two influential organizations come together to push the industry forward,” added Helleboid. “This will allow businesses using OFX connectivity to continue to get value from OFX and also have a path to the new FDX standard within their own time frames.”

Advertisement

SOURCE Financial Data Exchange (FDX)