Overview

RSSOFX is an open financial industry working group created to define extensions to RSS to include information you would normally find in a checking, savings, or credit card statements. This has the end result of enabling RSS to be a form of “live statement” for a user’s financial accounts. RSSOFX also defines several security models for the exchange of this financial data.

RSSOFX Background

In early 2007, Jwaala (the creators of the award winning MoneyTracker software) incorporated RSS feeds for transaction histories into the MoneyTracker product. For online banking users who already knew about and embraced RSS, this was a fantastic new way to keep track of their finances and transactions.

Originally, the MoneyTracker RSS feeds stayed within the standard RSS specification, creating RSS items with titles like “AMEX - $22.41 - Fresh Choice Restaurant”. However, in Q2 of 2007, the MoneyTracker RSS feeds where extended to include structured data regarding the transactions and accounts. This saw the addition of namespaced fields like amount and balance.

In order to prevent fragmentation around the process of extending RSS to include transaction data, Jwaala started the RSSOFX working group.

RSS Background

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

RSS content can be read using software called a “feed reader” or an “aggregator.” The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

Today, RSS is most commonly used as a “push format” for delivering syndated news feeds (like headlines and article summaries). In fact, you can find RSS feeds available on just about any news site (CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, BBC). However, RSS is also very extensible, and in fact has been extended to include things like geo location data, stock data, job data, weather data, and lots lots more.

The RSS specification can be characterized by its simplicity and openness. The latest RSS specification RSS 2.0x is in fact only about 8 pages long.

OFX Background

Open Financial Exchange or OFX was originally based on Microsoft’s OFC and Intuit’s Open Exchange and is a data-stream format for exchanging financial information.

The OFX standard was announced on the 16 January 1997 by Microsoft, Intuit and CheckFree and was designed as a unified technical specification to converge their respective mechanisms. Since the specification allows for bank and application specific extensions, few banks support OFX as a vendor-independent format, preferring to support a narrow subset used only by a specific financial software application, such as Quicken. To date, there are no publicly available and accurate lists of banks that fully support OFX.

In contrast to the relative simplicity of RSS, OFX is a large and complex specification. In fact, the OFX specification currently stands at a whopping 665 pages (and that does not include the 14000+ lines of XML schema spread across 59 files).

While the OFX specification is very thorough and complete (including things like bill pay, investments, and bill presentment), the most commonly used component of OFX is to download a list of accounts and transactions for those accounts.

NOTE: some of the above content is from wikipedia