On October 22nd, 2009, Nationwide, perhaps the only bank in the UK to support it, disabled OFX reports and with it support for hundreds of different financial tools including Microsoft Money, Wesabe, Moneydance and even my own OFX client. According to their support page, this was due to the burden put on their customer services in fielding questions about Microsoft Money and the lack of in-kind support from Microsoft who stopped selling Money earlier this year.
What Nationwide don’t seem to realise is that it costs them nothing to quietly leave OFX support enabled for use by the hundreds of other programs out there that are not Microsoft Money. If customer service calls were costing too much then they should end the customer support rather than the technical support. Why punish all of us who were happily using the Nationwide OFX service and putting no burden on their support staff?
If someone can recommend a decent UK bank that supports the OFX protocol to access transaction data, I would seriously consider moving my money away from Nationwide. They may believe they are saving money by disabling OFX support but from the comments I’ve been receiving, I’d wager they’ll lose even more if all of us Wesabe, Moneydance and Money users were to go elsewhere.