Financial Data Exchange (AKA: FDX)

John, as usual, thank you for this post and explanation. I feel "lucky" I had the experience of dealing with EWC+ with my overall fine Schwab migration experience a few weeks back, and as someone who enjoys understanding electronic banking, this post and references are quite interesting to me.

I share your suspicisions and concerns.

My understanding is the sole security benefit of the FDX API is the MFA authentication of the token (aka certificate).

I do hope Quicken Inc. does decide to join the consortium and is able provide a direct connect-like access using the FDX API. I guess they'd call it: Direct Connect+.

Note: The weaknesses inherent in the Express Web Connect connection method persist in EWC+. Most notably, stale data and the lack of payment services.

As acceptance of the FDX API spreads, I expect we'll be seeing better aggregation services at the member portals.

This is not my area of expertise, but I understood that the improved security also included not having the logon credentials available to Quicken, et. al.. And to having the token "expire" fairly "quickly" - reducing the likelihood of its being misused by others.

That thought led me to believe that FDX/EWC+ might not lend itself to being part of a legitimate One Step Update (as I already do not think EWC with MFA is a legitimate part of a One Step Update): I'm thinking that expiring tokens will require re-authorizations, which I picture as users being required to repeatedly supply logon credentials to successfully re-authorize. Sadly, I don't think the financial institutions would care much about Quicken users experiencing a degraded OSU.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong about the repeated re-authorizations.

As do I. Quicken (and Intuit) are already members of FDX; but I'm not sure what that means in terms of Quicken's willingness/ability to bring Direct Connect up FDX standards.

"Direct Connect+"; I like that. :)

I agree and am not happy about it - especially the loss of online billpay support when Direct Connect financial institutions elect to switch to EWC+. Hopefully Direct Connect+ will be the way around that.

Though I'm generally a skeptic, I have a hidden optimistic side. My hidden optimism wishes (and even assumes) that you're right.

I believe that the changes required to support FDX are fairly significant, and that the Quicken customers of the financial institutions that are early adopters of FDX have borne the brunt of that difficult change. I'm not sure Quicken can withstand repeated results like those experienced by Schwab users (for example).

[I have another concern about all this, which is the possible impact of a previous Quicken change: the creation and use of Cloud files. I don't think the ramifications of Quicken's use of Cloud files is very well understood by more than a handful of Quicken users: and my suspicion is that some users have already run afoul of problems with Cloud files. I think that some users having problems switching from EWC to EWC+ may not be aware that (I believe) having multiple QDF/Cloud files could be having an impact. One possible example I believe is those users who have a "test file" where they attempt to work out Quicken problems - including those who prefer to test new Quicken releases in a test Quicken file. It seems to me that users who have multiple QDF files may be creating problems for EWC/EWC+ downloads. I've found it extremely difficult to pin down the actual impact of multiple QDF files on EWC (and now EWC+), but I suspect there may be problems there. And I'm completely ignoring the "effective" loss of Quicken "Copy" to remove logically deleted Quicken data, etc. - having to re-activate all activated accounts is too high a price to pay for Quicken's choice to use Cloud files as they do.]

Correct. The availability of the MFA authentication of the token replaces the requirement to provide sign-in credentials while the token remains valid.

I suppose "expire" fairly "quickly" is subjective. I suspect expiration will be on the order of months.

I hadn't realized Quicken Inc. had joined. That is good to know.

I agree. In my opinion, Schwab mismanaged the transition but many Quicken users won't see it that way. I'm very thankful we closed our Schwab accounts years ago.

Again, I agree. I think there are variety of issues that stem from Quicken's decision to use of a fixed identifier for a Quicken file as the link to a cloud account.

I sincerely hope you're correct. My thought was that users were experiencing the requirement to authorize much more frequently than that. While I realized that certainly could have been a problem in the implementation, I also feared it might be a desired "feature".

[The skeptic in me is reluctant to assume that FDX will eliminate the necessity for the current 2FA interruptions to EWC downloads, but I can't imagine why they would still be needed so I can hope.]

I'm also hoping that the reported limitation of one EWC+ authorized Quicken file per financial institution is not going to be a permanent restriction. I like to be able to preview the impact of new releases in a test file: bad enough to fight the Cloud Sync issue for multiple Quicken files; being also prevented from doing that new release preview for EWC+ financial institutions would be a really bad outcome from my point of view.

I wound up at Schwab because USAA gave up on handling investments and sold their investment accounts to Schwab. Up until just recently, I rather liked Schwab.

My hope is that it'll actually be on the order of years.

They do appear to have eased this constraint recently. Instead of the file identifier, they now appear to be using the Quicken ID:

Thank you! That is very welcome news for me.