Charles Schwab

As of the 16th October 2020, it appears that Charles Schwab have disabled their OFX server. If you try to connect on either of the available options by using either an existing connection or trying to add a new one, you're likely to get a 403 error:

Charles Schwab 403 error screenshot

We've done some investigation, and with the help of a few Charles Schwab customers who also use MoneyWell, we've been able to establish the following:

Schwab recently made significant changes to the way they offer connections.

They published this press release about the changes earlier in the year, although they didn't reference Direct Connect directly, only screen-scraping services, but it seems that the agreements and changes have now led to the retirement of their OFX server:

https://pressroom.aboutschwab.com/press-releases/press-release/2020/Charles-Schwab-Reinforces-Its-Commitment-to-Customer-Data-Protection/default.aspx

Schwab have signed an agreement with three specific (huge) companies to enable other companies to provide customers to access their data, possibly in part to avoid having to deal with many small software companies such as us. While they have told some customers that any organisation can request API access, the fact that one of these organisations is Yodlee, a financial data aggregator, leads us to believe that for product like MoneyWell to access the data, we'd have to do so via Yodlee. Even if this isn't the case, the fact that there is no API standard (unlike Direct Connect), and thousands of financial institutions means that engaging each institution to implement their API will be impossible on a number of levels.

We definitely want to be able to offer these kinds of connections going forward, and have had talks with various companies aggregation companies previously about the services that they offer in relation to MoneyWell. Significant changes would be required to MoneyWell to be able to access and import that kind of data and it's technically feasible, but also, we'd be signing up for signifiant ongoing costs. As such, while it's definitely something we want and need to add to MoneyWell and that is on our roadmap, we can't put any timescale on implementing this at present. 

In the shorter term, it is still possible to import your financial data into MoneyWell by downloading an OFX file from your online banking and importing it directly. 

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