We are really glad to announce that Buxfer now supports “auto” downloading of your transactions from over 300 banks, credit unions and credit card institutions. Here’s the list of currently supported institutions:

As before, you will need to enter your bank / credit-card password every time you synchronize. We will NEVER store that password. It’s a trade-off between security and convenience we must have until we work out a smarter way.

This feature is currently in a BETA stage, so if you encounter any problems please let us know. Similarly, if your institution is not yet supported (especially for international users), please get in touch with us. We will soon be releasing support for syncing with international banks as well, so we sure wouldn’t mind some helpful early testers :)

Update: A few of our users have asked us how we obtain data from the financial institutions. For most of the institutions listed above, we use the Direct OFX Connect protocol used by Quicken, MS Money, MoneyDance and other desktop softwares. Note that this means that for some institutions (e.g., Chase banking, etc.), our users may need to explicitly enable (and sometimes, even pay for) “Quicken download”. That said, we are constantly working on improving this feature to remove some of these limitations.

If you have a Windows Live account, you can simply use it to login on Buxfer. No need to fill out signup forms or remember yet another password. We already support logging in with Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, and OpenID accounts, but after receiving numerous requests from users, we quickly added Windows Live to the list. Just click the icon on the home page!