My letter to Intuit (Quicken) after finding out that Quicken 2005 will not allow me to import my checking account's QIF data anymore:
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Forcing financial insitutions to support OFX transaction download by dropping QIF import support only ends up hurting the very customers that want to use your product. I bank with a smaller insitution that's been faithfully serving our city for almost 90 years, providing far better service, even online, than the big-name banks available in my area. Their web site allows me to download in QIF, IIF, and CSV format, and using Quicken's QIF import with their data has always worked perfectly. They also provide a download with file extension .OFX, which they list as being for Microsoft Money. I assume the MS Money OFX is the same OFX format that Quicken is expecting. However, when I attempt to import checking data downloaded in that format, quicken responds with "Quicken is currently unable to verify the financial institution information for this download. Please try again later." Is this Quicken recognizing the data, but rejecting it because the bank name is not recognized. If so, that's absurd. Are you charging institutions money to be listed in Quicken?
Instead of forcing customers to use an old version of your product, or switching to a megacorp bank that provides inferior customer service, you should be doing everything possible to get customer data into your program. "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." My only options are to revert to a previous Quicken version (missing out on new features, but also not giving Intuit any more money), find some third-party workaround to your arbitrary drop of support, or use a competing product. I'm inclined to switch to another piece of software since Intuit seems more interested in forcing their vision on banks and customers than helping them.
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More information on the QIF-support drop from the horse's mouth, and a FAQ.
I think an open format is great. I think Intuit's decision to arbitrarily drop support for their own data format to force everyone, regardless of ability (banks now have to pay for new software, or pay developers to alter their existing version), to use OFX is just plain stupid.