PocketSense and Fidelity -- The party ending soon? F2O?

[Cal Learner]

I just saw this. This has been expected. I feel fortunate that the party did not end sooner, and we got to enjoy the use of the OFX server longer.

I think this link  will probably work without a login: https://www.fidelity.com/security/third-party-app-protection

What you need to know about third-party websites and apps

We're always enhancing how we safeguard your Fidelity account data. As such, we want you to know about a new connection we've implemented to help secure your Fidelity account data whenever it is being transferred to third-party websites and apps through data aggregators. Examples of these third parties include:

• Money management websites and apps that let you see all your accounts from multiple providers
• Budgeting apps and banking tools that import your spending and saving information from your Fidelity accounts
• Person-to-person payment apps that link to your Fidelity account

While these websites use data aggregators that may make accessing your Fidelity account data more convenient, they may also use the Fidelity username and password you provided to them, which means they could have the same access to your Fidelity account data that you do.

How Fidelity is helping protect your data

To enhance the protection of your account data, Fidelity has established a secure connection that better controls how third-party websites and apps that you've authorized, and the data aggregators they use, connect to your accounts. Fidelity is requiring these data aggregators to transition to this secure connection. Fidelity users of some third-party websites and apps may experience a disruption in the link between those websites and apps and their Fidelity accounts. However, there is no change to your ability to access your accounts or transact through the Fidelity app or on Fidelity.com.

I believe their plan is that if you want to read your Fidelity transactions into your personal finance software, such as many of us do with PocketSense, you would have to involve a third party. You give that third party to read your info, and that third party would pass your info to your software.

We realists/pessimists expect there will be a long hard-to-understand privacy policy by the third party saying how they will share your info without enumerating who they will share with. Expect the third parties to charge money, and probably only provide the info to their own software -- not Microsoft Money. Even worse, in a way, would be if they offered to handle your data free.

The big question is whether Fidelity will have a way to download QFX/OFX files from their website without involving a third party, as Vanguard started doing, or not.

If not, some of us will start using a program called F2O for real. I wrote, and others have contributed to,  F2O (Fidelity to OFX) to parse the Fidelity CSV activity and positions CSV files, and generate OFX files for PocketSense or other personal finance software. https://groups.google.com/g/microsoft-money/search?q=f20 will bring up threads where this was discussed.

Your interim action item is to be saving your OFX files while Fidelity provides them. Given the folder of OFX files, F2O can parse the files, and produce the database of information that it uses. You can produce that database without existing OFX files, but it will be more work. Even one recent set of OFX files will help a lot. Unfortunately PocketSense deletes the old OFX files in XFR before trying to fetch new ones. I save all of my old OFX files with a line in the batch file I use to invoke PocketSense; disk space is cheap and plentiful, with OFX files averaging well under 0.0001 GB each.

Anyway,  if Fidelity gives you OFX web downloads, I don't expect F2O to be utilized. If not, many of us expect use it.  The days that follow Fidelity stopping providing QFX/OFX will be busy for me and some others.

[Tom Meyer]

My Fidelity/Pocketsense is still worknig fine.  I'm running it everyday on a Debian server at 6:15am CST.  My biggest problem is linking Citibank to my Savings account.  I can push a OFX, but pulling is not an option.  I can pull my CC, just not a savings account.

Tom-Texas

[-Kevin N]

Hi Cal,

Thank you for the heads up and thank you again for your work on F2O.

If / when Fidelity pulls the plug on direct-connect, do you think that you may then make a version of F2O available that is ported to Python 3?

-Kevin N.

[Cal Learner]

Kevin, while PocketSense uses Python 2.7.x, I would want to be able to use the same.

I did play with trying to make F2O work with either, but that presented problems. 

[-Kevin N]

Hi Cal,

Thank you for your reply.  I understand completely.

I've been using Pocketsense ported to Python 3 on a separate machine which seems to work pretty well

GitHub - magnuspyke/ofxscripts

-Kevin N.

[Cal Learner]

I just read a post in a Fidelity Community...

2 hours ago

I have not transitioned to the new download yet. There are numerous problems reported on the Quicken community. The switchover will be mandatory on 8/20 (at least that's the current plan).

My big concern is data security. As I understand EWC, the data is stored online in Quicken (or some other online data provider, I'm not sure which) and is updated on a regular basis. It can then be downloaded to the Quicken program without going to Fidelity. The Fidelity account password is also stored by Quicken.

I do not want my account data or passwords to be held anywhere in the cloud. I log on to my bank and download all the accounts manually rather than using EWC. It appears that there is no QFX download for Fidelity accounts (except for the Rewards Visa card) so I will probably be entering all my account updates manually from now on. What a pain!

Edited: for the note on the download of the Rewards Visa card

Those who think they might want to run F20, but have not taken recent action may want to re-visit that. I have not worked on F2O for a while, but I did run F2O_DBgather.py to update my  F2O_DB.csv.  I also have my PocketSense batch file keep a copy of my fidelity*.ofx files for each day, since F2O_DBgather.py can produce a  F2O_DB.csv given a collection of  fidelity*.ofx files.

As for now, unless there are questions as to how to do something, or why one would want to do something, I will wait until the Fidelity OFX server disappears.  It would be a lot easier for somebody to pick up F2O after things stop working  if they had at least one copy of the files from their XFR folder of Pocketsense. Let this be a voice of one crying in the wilderness.

[Dan Adkins]

On this site https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7963195/what-s-going-on-between-fidelity-and-quicken , it is stated that the new connection will be EWC+.  I am not familiar with that, but it is implied that Schwab switched to that a while ago.

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[Ameridan (microsoftmoneyoffline.wordpress.com)]

Sorry Cal;  I guess I repeated what you already stated ;)  I just ran my F2O bat files again, but the loss of the OFX server will be a real bummer!

[Cal Learner]

https://www.reddit.com/r/fidelityinvestments/comments/1mtvvev/please_do_not_drop_support_of_quicken_direct/ It is the Direct Connect OFX server that PocketSense accesses for your Fidelity transactions and prices.

Pocketsense users, at a minimum, should save recent Fidelity*.OFX files from the xfr\ folder periodically. From such copies, you can later adopt F2O after the P first PocketSense use attempt after the server is gone deletes your OFX files, that F2O can use for analysis. Inside the batch file I use to run PocketSense, add copies of my Fidelity OFX files to a folder called oldofx. It is not harmful to have multiple OFX files-- no need to delete the older ones.  Given one or more sets of Fidelity OFX files could let you could update the CUSIPS etc with F2O much more easily. If there is interest in how you could do that and more in a batch file, I could post one.

You might consider trying F2O sooner. https://microsoftmoneyoffline.wordpress.com/2024/02/03/cals-fidelity-specific-csv-to-ofx-converter/ This may be more work than you might hope, but it is easier now than it will be later. Plus it helps us all if any bugs get discovered. Fortunately the OFX server has taken longer to disappear than we feared. But when it happens, expect a flurry of activity and maybe regret from not saving OFX files.