History
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. The first OFX specification, version 1.0, was released on February 14, 1997.
The specification allows for bank and application specific extensions, although only a subset is necessary to describe a financial transaction. Since the current version is a flavour of XML, it is simple to create well-formed OFX documents.
Versions 1.0–1.6 relied on SGML for data exchange whereas all versions since are XML based. According to the main OFX site: "The specification is freely licensed, allowing any software developer to design an interface that will be supported on the front-end."
Read more about this topic: Open Financial Exchange
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