OFX is the Open Financial eXchange protocol used by various financial institutions in a few countries. KMyMoney provides an OFX client implementation using the open source LibOFX library allowing users to import transactions directly from the bank’s server without using the detour through a web-browser and a downloaded file into the ledger of the application.
A while ago, a KMyMoney user reported a problem with a single institution using OFX transaction download. Out of a sudden, this feature did not work anymore and the bank did not allow to login anymore and provided the following error message:
We're very sorry, but that content you are looking for can't be found. Please try the homepage again. If you continue to receive this message, please call the Customer Service number on the back of your card. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience.
Since there was no change on the KMyMoney side nor on LibOFX, the problem must have been with the institution. So he contacted their customer support but the answers did not help to solve the problem.
Not surprisingly I got nowhere talking to tech support at the bank. I don’t think anyone answering the phones knows anything about direct connect .”Can you logon to our website” and “reinstall your personal finance software” is about all they could suggest.
A frustrated KMyMoney user about his banks customer support
We know these answers just to well and one can find them on mailing lists and forums of almost any open source finance applications in or another form.
Living in a country where banks don’t use OFX at all, it is kind of hard to support these stranded users. We tried to log the requests and analyze them, but all just looked well according to the OFX specs.
Searching the web, I came across a posting where a GnuCash user reported, that adding a trailing blank to the username and changing the application version in the request solved the problem. This just sounded too strange, so I forwarded this information to the user and he answered:
Not surprisingly… ipwizard does it again!
I changed the APP_VER to 2400 using the KMM online settings as suggested. Then I saved my KMM file in XML, opened the XML and added a space to me user name.
Worked like a charm.
A happy KMyMoney user
I was also able to get it working with KMM 4.8.0. I just unmapped and remapped the account adding a space to the end of the user ID and using 2700 as the version. No XML hacking required.
Another KMyMoney user also being happy
As a side effect of my search, I stumbled across a posting about OFX security issues. Very interesting article which does not surprise me and shows the partial ignorance of banks regarding security on top of their sometimes non-existant customer support if it comes to home banking.