Buxfer: Blog

Synchronize accounts with over 300 banks or credit cards

November 21st, 2007 by Ashwin

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Bank accounts, New features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Fabian Says:
November 21st, 2007 at 10:25 pm

Awesome work! How about adding Westpac (www.westpac.co.nz)? It has a fairly big userbase here in New Zealand and a solid web interface.

Ashwin Says:
November 21st, 2007 at 11:47 pm

Fabian: yes, I remember you had requested this the last time we announced auto-synchronization as well. I am exploring this now and will get back to you as soon as I have made some progress.

dmnd Says:
November 22nd, 2007 at 12:07 am

How about National Australia Bank while you’re at it? nab.com.au. It’s one of the larger Australian banks.

John Says:
November 23rd, 2007 at 9:52 am

Can you add “E*Trade Bank” and “Bank of America (Credit)” ?

VentureBeat » Buxfer is giving Mint, other personal finance sites, a run for their money Says:
January 4th, 2008 at 2:28 pm

[...] Like Mint and the others, Buxfer has introduced a way to let you easily synchronize your financial accounts from Bank of America, American Express, Citibank credit cards, Chase credit cards, and more than 300 others with your personal finance information on its site. It uses Google Gears to download your financial account information to an offline Buxfer component that lives on your computer, that syncs with your online Buxfer account. It’s the company’s policy to never story sensitive user information on its servers, include your bank account passwords. It accesses the data stored on your Google Gears database on your computer, and authenticates you and your information with your financial institution. You can delete the data or make it unavailable to Buxfer whenever you want. [...]

Heri Says:
January 5th, 2008 at 9:59 am

hey guys,

quicken and other financial desktop software work with most canadian banks
what about Royal Bank of Canada and TD Canada TRust, the 2 largest banks in Canada. They have millions of customers and most people use the net to access to their accounts.

if you can do this, ping me at the email address and i will blog about it at montrealtechwatch.com

Anonymous Says:
January 8th, 2008 at 4:41 pm

If you add TCF Bank and ING Direct (USA)… then I would create an account.

Ashwin Says:
January 9th, 2008 at 1:09 pm

@John: BofA - credit cards is available now, and so is Washington Mutual. Enjoy!

I am Desi Says:
January 10th, 2008 at 3:48 am

Hey Guys,

Great work!!! Really great work from IITians… :)

I am from India living out in Phoenix, AZ and will be glat to help you with testing of International banks as I have accounts in India.

Let me know (email me) if you need my help.

Best luck!

Duane Says:
February 27th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

If you add the big 5 Canadian banks to your synchronize feature, you’d go a long way to providing some value to the core facebook-myspace generation. That is, Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS), Bank of Montreal (BMO), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Toronto Dominion Canada Trust (TD), and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). Unlike the states, there’s no need to add 300 banks to the list to get most of the customers. Those 5 would just about do it.
Duane

Sam Brightman Says:
May 14th, 2008 at 6:16 am

I’m using Nationwide Building Society, UK, both credit card and normal savings/online accounts (apparently one of the few UK ones to support some kind of direct connection) and Credit Suisse Switzerland. Neither seems to be supported with or without Firebux. Is there any chance of this being added soon?

Rick Says:
May 31st, 2008 at 7:17 pm

I want to second the request for you to include E*Trade. As soon as this happens, I will move from Mint to Buxfer.

Jamie Says:
June 24th, 2008 at 11:26 am

I’d love to see TD Banknorth added. Thanks!

Ashwin Says:
June 24th, 2008 at 3:29 pm

@Jamie: I have just added TD Banknorth — could you please try it out and let me know if it works?

Aston Says:
June 27th, 2008 at 10:49 am

I see you support SunTrust, but I can’t get it to work. I’ve tried auto-syncing through the website and even tried Firebux. No dice either way. I do have and pay for the online banking and can manually download my transactions in about 5 different (supportable) formats which work great when I upload these manually.

Has anyone had success auto-syncing a SunTrust account?

Ashwin Says:
July 1st, 2008 at 2:12 am

Aston: we have updated our support for quite a few banks. The prominent ones include Regions Bank, Sun Trust (Consumer Banking) and Citizens Bank. Can you try again and see if things work now?

Sandy Says:
July 5th, 2008 at 8:37 am

If you add Bank of the West, I would consider using your service. I’m currently using Quicken online and like it, it’s reliable (after a rocky start) but doesn’t track my cash expenses and is limited on tracking all categories (it lumps alot into the “other” category.

I’d like to give yours a try, but need the bank synced in.

Thanks