Why is it so hard to connect my bank accounts to GnuCash?

July 14, 2024 11:27 AM

I recently started using GnuCash to manage my finances, after years of just holding things in my head and occasionally updating a spreadsheet with my different retirement and savings accounts. I'm aware of some of the resources for implementing OFX Direct Connect in GnuCash, but I have also heard anecdotally that this is one of those things that is just infinitely easier in Europe (and possibly other places) where HBCI is standard. I would like to understand why this is.

At this point I have a few accounts at different institutions, between joint and personal checking and savings accounts, different types of IRAs, and an IRA. I don't need to be able to sync transactions or pay bills from GnuCash (though that would be amazing!) but i would like to avoid downloading a separate QFX file for every account. My goal is to enter liabilities and see my financial situation at a glance. I am not committed to GnuCash but I am committed to not giving money to Intuit for quite a few reasons.

I would love more detail about countries with explicit laws that require banks to allow customers to access their accounts via an open format? Is that actually a thing in other places or did someone kind of exaggerate?

I kind of assume that US banks haven't widely adopted any open banking connection protocol because Intuit has strategically fought off any interventions that might undermine their monopoly but I am just assuming. I'd love to find actual fact checked reporting on this overall situation as well as any advocacy organizations that are genuinely trying to assert a level playing field for accounting software. What should I be looking at to understand the state of affairs?



PS. I would love to be wrong, so I'll take "actually, by law all FDIC insured banks are required to support EBCIS and you can use this complaint form if they say they won't give you the connection data."

posted by amandabee to Law & Government (4 answers total)

Best answer:

I would love more detail about countries with explicit laws that require banks to allow customers to access their accounts via an open format? Is that actually a thing in other places or did someone kind of exaggerate?

It’s sort of a thing. Some countries have laws requiring open banking, which requires banks to provide allow access to their transaction data to third parties via APIs. It’s not quite the same as having an open format but it does mean that third-party banking apps — aggregating information from multiple banks — are possible.

In the UK, it’s called Open Banking (note the proper name) and expands on the requirements mandated by the EU Payment Services Directive 2.

The nine biggest banks and building societies are required to provide API access to their data to licensed Account Information Service Providers (AISPs) who can then offer services to customers of those banks. While this has led to some apps that aggregate transactions from multiple accounts, it’s also led to a lot of services that try to persuade you to give access to your transaction data (very valuable to them) in return for some sort of reward like cashback.

In addition to AISPs, there’s also Payment Initiation Service Providers (PISPs) — licensed companies that can use Open Banking to move money around. This had led to what’s sometimes known as ‘pay by bank’, an online checkout process where you get taken to your online banking app to approve a payment for something, which has gained some traction because it can be faster than entering card details and generally much cheaper for the merchant.

Here’s a guide for consumers to Open Banking.
posted by kyten at 12:54 PM on July 14 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I would like to understand why this is.

I tried to use gnucash for a while and have long since given up. I think there are a few factors here I can identify based on both my experience with gnucash as well as OSS. Some of what I've written here I've also picked up recently while trying to figure out a Mint alternative (so far, no conclusions).

Standards: yes, very fragmented. I'm not sure how much lobbying Intuit actually does in this area and qif (supported by gnucash) is actually an open intuit format. I believe gnucash also supports OFX, another open api partly supported by Intuit. But direct support by banks for OFX is limited (e.g., my bank does not support it afaik). I think Intuit now is focused on something called OFX Webconnect that is less easy for gnucash to use. I would be completely unsurprised if lobbying from other entities is impacting this situation, but I don't know much about this. Most of the action in the US is not in direct connections to banks, but rather middlemen connectors, for example Plaid and MX. have the impression that Plaid has basically been the dominant company here for years. If you were using a commercial equivalent to gnucash, this is what they'd often be using (e.g. YNAB, rocket money, the now-defunct Mint, etc). More recently, Fidelity (and some other banks) have been pushing Akoya (summary, I can't particularly vouch for that substack in general, it's just a useful link I found now), and controversially fidelity no longer supports Plaid. Akoya is at least supposed to be security conscious and does no screen scraping. These protocols are not really designed for the end user to access directly, and I believe some may charge for non-developer access.

Gnucash itself: as an OSS project, gnucash is at the mercy of a volunteer development team. Speaking as someone who has been pretty involved in open source, I think that traditional apps are the things that often suffer the most from this, where the feature set a commercial app would target in a concerted, systematic way in OSS ends up very fragmentary due to how OSS contributions often work, with tons of legacy code / design decisions accruing. It's entirely possible there are standards that may work, but haven't been implemented because no one who has the expertise has also had the time and the will to see it through. I wouldn't be surprised also if, given that this is an official GNU project, some developers would have serious qualms about the non-open nature of the connector APIs. Though I did find a tiny bit of discussion where they seemed receptive? It could actually be worth asking gnucash people directly.

Also, while writing this answer I ran across this command line tool that aims to directly extract qif data from plaid for purposes of gnucash using a plaid developer account. If you're willing to make use of plaid and have the tech knowledge to get it working, this might be an option...
posted by advil at 8:10 AM on July 15 [2 favorites]

As an annoyed user, I divide the problem into two parts:
1) do the financial companies put out an API so that a program can download my data at my behest, and
2) do they allow me to download data in a open format that's more manipulable than a PDF?

I don't think I used to be able to download any CSV representation of my transactions, and now several institutions do provide it, although it's in a different place for each of them. Progress!
posted by clew at 10:04 AM on July 15

Response by poster: I hate putting "resolved" on this because I don't have the perfect, most elegant solution, but I do have more clarity about why the situation is what it is. I really appreciate that.
posted by amandabee at 5:05 PM on September 9