Fidelity Access
If I understand correctly Fidelity is replacing use of direct connect / OFX protocol with a new protocol referred to as "Fidelity Access". From what I can see Moneydance (and Quicken) do not (yet?) support this new protocol.
This is important in that Fidelity has indicated the continued use of MoneyDance then violates their lost funds replacement guarantee due to use of nonapproved 3rd party. Note that their use of term "3rd Party" seems different than infinitekind.
I note that Vanguard has also stopped use of OFX and does not seem to have a replacement intent. Have to use downloads by account.
Can anyone at Moneydance provide current status of this? Will Moneydance be updated to support Fidelity Access?
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451 Posted by richardtaylor on 02 May, 2026 03:21 PM
Thanks for the update Sean, you are showing grace under fire. I would just like to add a voice for moving Fidelity up in the roadmap. This is a loss of functionality, not an added feature and with over 40 million users, I'm guessing this effects a large share of your user base.
452 Posted by dtd on 02 May, 2026 06:48 PM
@mmd - just downloaded my April set of transactions from my accounts at Fidelity investment and used your extension to import into Moneydance. Took about 2-3 minutes to do everything.
re Sean's comment: "I would be happy to help with @mmd's extension as a short term fix for the problem with Fidelity, but I would need to get up to speed on how it works."
Give me a shout on slack to discuss how to engage Sean to make your extension an official one.
453 Posted by mmd on 02 May, 2026 09:19 PM
@dtd replied to your message, thanks for your attention to this goal and glad you had a great experience so far!
454 Posted by biozom on 09 May, 2026 02:15 PM
"Plaid Bank Connectivity Issues" https://help.aura.com/s/article/plaid-bank-connectivity-issues
not a lot of details about issues but at least they're acknowledged/known and published by somebody out there
455 Posted by David on 09 May, 2026 03:53 PM
Question about the extension. I managed to get it to work last month — but now when I try again, I get an error message that my account is not found. Nothing has changed in my MD setup, and when I inspect the CSV file, it seems to have the same columns including the same account number as always. Any suggestions?
456 Posted by dtd on 09 May, 2026 05:32 PM
It appears your account name and number in MD don't match what fidelity has. Don't know why given it worked and nothing changed. I'd look at what the message says and compare name and number carefully on both sides.
457 Posted by David on 09 May, 2026 06:22 PM
But the account name and number do match, and are exactly the same as in previous CSV downloads as well.
458 Posted by dtd on 09 May, 2026 06:46 PM
next thing, i'd think if anything else changed between last month and this month. are you using v13, and did you download all accounts vs one account, also if the above represents 4 accounts, do they now all not work?
459 Posted by Bob on 09 May, 2026 08:26 PM
I noticed the same thing about one of my account numbers no longer being recognized. It seemed to have started doing this around v10 or so, but it was only on my cash management account. This was actually a good thing for me because the extension doesn't handle merging so I have to use the 'CSV Importer' extension for the CMA. Back when account matching worked for the CMA in mmd's extension, I always had to delete the CMA transactions and re-import them with the 'CSV Importer' extension to get merging to work. Now that the account matching for the CMA no longer works, it saves me a step.
460 Posted by holden on 09 May, 2026 10:02 PM
@mmd - Thanks to you and everyone else who contributed to standing up this extension. It has been a life saver while waiting for a fully-integrated solution from IK.
FYI only, I made a local fork... My core holdings (SPAXX typically) have always been treated as cash in Moneydance, and I rarely (if ever) saw a reinvestment transaction on monthly interest/dividends. With the CSV export, I'm seeing a separate dividend reinvestment transaction every month for each of the accounts I'm tracking. Instead of manually filtering these from the CSV file, it was a straightforward edit to the extension to suppress these in a local forked copy.
461 Posted by David on 10 May, 2026 03:51 PM
Thank you for asking this question. I have two accounts (one personal and one an employer 401(K)). Highlighting the personal account, downloading, and importing it with the extension worked! Previously, I had not been highlighting the personal account, though the only transactions in the CSV file had been from that account nonetheless.
Thank you - problem solved (for now, anyway)
462 Posted by pete on 11 May, 2026 07:21 PM
Re SOC Type 2, big companies like to shift judgement-calls away from their own tens-of-thousands of worldwide-employees and towards binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’ determinations (e.g. checking-a-box, mandating SOC Type 2 for Plaid end-points).
Thus large, procedure-driven companies consider SOC Type 2 compliance (even WITH access to consumer data) superior to “the architecture doesn’t provide us access to consumer data” because the former includes controls verification and attestation thereof by a third party.
And while SOC Type 2 is hosting/cloud-oriented, there is some value for partners or customers of locally-run software like MD. E.g. verification or ‘testing’ of actively-managed controls on code-access and deployment thereof may reduce the chance of the software being altered by a non-employee actor (or past employee or partner) in a way that DOES provide access end-user data / comprises user data security.
That typed / In defense of IK:
I used to work for Fidelity-sized company and I often worked with IK-sized partners. Getting SOC Type 2 compliance in place for a small Co is a big deal. It can take 6 months to a year. And the steps involved can be a major ~distraction as there can be a lot of items that don’t seem relevant - Cos read them, get worked-up (‘not relevant!), and then work through how to address (physical access is a common one). And you need to pay a third party to complete the auditing/testing/reporting (and then keep doing it). For a small company focused on 1 or 2 ~niche services the $ cost of the report may rival most other third-party costs and not appear to add much value other that “permission to integrate” with some giant-and-demanding ~partner.
463 Posted by pete on 11 May, 2026 07:21 PM
Back to Fidelity…so let’s say I personally understand the SOC Type 2 demand for Plaid end-points, given my above post. I don’t understand Fidelity’s complete elimination of OFX download when they still support CSV.
At best it seems overly draconian and certain to incentivize work-around consumer behavior WORSE than whatever would happen otherwise.
So in my case, I’ve been moving away from Fidelity the past couple of months; I just completed ‘catching-up’ the past three months of Fidelity transactions and don’t expect doing it at that level again.
The reality is - for me - Fidelity is easier to replace than Moneydance.
464 Posted by sth on 23 May, 2026 09:14 PM
It is a good point that I have made to my Fidelity advisor that having a CSV download protected by nothing more than account/password (and optional 2FA) is much worse security than an Oauth2 security check like Plaid.
Also a simple search returns the following info:
This is compared to the very very low cost for MD as software. So I see this as a Fidelity problem more than an IK problem though IK is stuck with fixing it. If all 100 followers of this thread called their Fidelity advisor and told them how much a connection to MD means to them, I am sure that it would become much more of a priority for Fidelity and things might move a lot quicker.
Or IK can get a professional consultant and auditor and increase the price for MD by a factor of 10. :-)
465 Posted by pctomac on 24 May, 2026 01:45 PM
Any update on whether Sean has reviewed and signed mmd's csv extension so that it can be selected from the Extensions menu within MoneyDance?
466 Posted by dtd on 24 May, 2026 05:32 PM
I'm not aware that mmd has submitted it, so probably no change.
I use it all the time though, just had it enter my trades from friday that close next tuesday.
467 Posted by mmd on 25 May, 2026 06:37 PM
Re importing with account numbers - I don't personally use this feature so if it broke I might not know.
I wonder if anything changed in the backend account numbers like using a non-ASCII character in the CSV file?
Maybe use a tool like https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~markm/ascii.html or https://www.soscisurvey.de/tools/view-chars.php to check the account numbers?
My account name matching still seems to work.
468 Posted by mmd on 25 May, 2026 06:48 PM
Just checked and at least copying pasting an account number from CSV file, changing the account name, deleting the transaction, and re-importing from CSV matches to account correctly.
469 Posted by Bob on 26 May, 2026 02:40 AM
@mmd: The account number match failure only occurs on my fidelity cash management account (CMA). All other accounts work fine. Since the CMA is set up in moneydance as a 'BANK' type account instead of an 'INVESTMENT' type account like all my other fidelity accounts that are working, I suspect that the failure has something to do with that.
However, this 'failure' actually works in my favor since your script/extension doesn't handle transaction merging. I have to import all of the CMA transactions using the 'CSV Importer' extension to get merging to work. Back when your script was correctly matching my CMA account name/number and importing those transactions into my MD CMA account, I had to delete them and then re-import them using 'CSV Importer'. So my vote here would be for you not to fix this CMA account number matching and leave everything alone (unless transaction merging is implemented).
BTW, thanks again for this script and to Stuart Beesley for his help turning it into an extension! I will never use a third-party aggregator for my financial transactions so this extension has been fantastic. There are a few tweaks I have to make occasionally due to fidelity's odd wording in some transaction descriptions (mainly in my 401k), but in general it does everything I need.
470 Posted by dan.tappan on 05 Jun, 2026 03:14 PM
This comment was split into a new private discussion: Fidelity Access
@SeanReilly,
Apparently Plaid has started working with Fidelity again! I was adding another account via Moneydance+ and Fidelity showed up as an option. When I tried to connect to my Fidelity accounts it (mostly) worked!
The issues I'm running into are that it doesn't seem to behave in exactly the same way as it did previously. Specifically, all the transactions between accounts that used to show up as Xfr now show up as MiscExp, and I have to manually correct the sign of the amount to keep the balances right.
Also, it's now showing transactions with my core cash fund for the account. E.g. it has a bunch of Buy and Sell for FIDELITY CASH RESERVES. The only way to avoid this messing up the cash balance was to put all my free cash into FIDELITY CASH RESERVES so the cash balance for the account now shows up as $0. This is less useful than previously when I could quickly look at the cash balance.
Is this a change to Plaid, possibly because it's using a new protocol to talk to Fidelity, or is it an issue with MoneyDance not handling the MoneyDance+/Plaid transactions correctly? Either way it's annoying.
For now, I'm going back to using the Fidelity import tool. The current behavior of MoneyDance+ requires too many manual changes to be useful
471 Posted by dtd on 05 Jun, 2026 03:45 PM
Yes, fidelity is working with MD+ - i note the connection is Plaid - Akoya - Fidelity now. so the Akoya fight between Plaid and Akoya finally ended.
I'll check out the idiosyncrasies soon, but what @dan.tappen is seeing tends to be normal MD+ stuff (as opposed to direct connect). I see such in Vanguard and Schwab as well, especially as regards cash accounts. I've always attributed it to Plaid, but probably worth more research especially to mention in the 2026 alpha testing if it is something consistent that MD could adjust even if it isn't MD's "fault",
I'm still keeping the Fidelity import tool as it seems quite reliable and does set the action steps correctly - that's why extensions are cool, they can be adjusted on a different timetable.
472 Posted by dtd on 05 Jun, 2026 07:13 PM
Taken from Fidelity website
473 Posted by ScottA on 05 Jun, 2026 09:38 PM
I set up MD+ with Fidelity/Plaid(/Akoya?) and have the same issues as dan.tappan.
The Cash Reserves thing is the result of setting up CMA as a bank account, when really it's an investment account with a cash sweep to a money market fund (such as SPAXX or Fidelity Cash Reserves). You don't actually have a cash balance there, you have a MM fund holding. Since I'll never have any other funds in that account, it's easier to treat it as a checking account and keep in mind that the "cash" is actually shares of the sweep fund. Then I just delete the downloaded sweep transaction.
For me, that delete step is more than worth it to pick up the perks of it being a bank account, e.g. being able to merge download transactions into existing ones.
The action being MiscExp instead of Div is indeed super annoying, but I had the same issue with CSV imports (and I think with OFX downloads when those worked, though I could be remembering a whole other institution). If MD allowed a Batch change to the Action field, this would be no big deal at all for me.
Thank you IK for working this out!
474 Posted by jpbears1 on 06 Jun, 2026 03:42 PM
Yes - thank you for this - MD+/Plaid/Fidelity works for me as well, again with the same issues as described above. I am just glad we have a working connection again to Fidelity!
475 Posted by rlsantella on 10 Jun, 2026 05:38 PM
So what's the verdict on this new Plaid/Akoya/MD+ download mechanism in terms of security?
476 Posted by dwg on 11 Jun, 2026 06:23 AM
@rlsantella
This is my take on your question.
It would be 'more' secure in that you are not providing a third party with your username and password, instead you are granting the third party access to the data and providing a 'token' for them to use to access this data.
However, a third party still has the data in their system so from that aspect it is less secure/private than say Direct Connect.
477 Posted by pctomac on 11 Jun, 2026 01:07 PM
Sorry to keep asking for this, but if mmd can please submit his program extension for review by Sean that would be much appreciated. I do not want to grant 3rd party access to my data so won't use Moneydance+. I also won't use any program that is not signed off by Sean and included as an extension within the Moneydance program proper. I have read great things about the mmd extension and would love to use it.
Thanks.
478 Posted by rlsantella on 15 Jun, 2026 08:11 PM
Fidelity/Plaid is certainly not working for me. I can conect, but when trying to match online accounts with MD the online name/number for all my mutliple Fidelity accounts are listed as "Brokerage Account" without an identifying name or number even though I only have one brokerage account. So I have no idea how to match online with MD. If I delete all connections and try linking only my brokerage account with Plaid I still get multiple accounts, again all identified as "Brokerage Account". Downloads via Plaid are not functional.
479 Posted by he on 16 Jun, 2026 08:55 AM
+1 on the issues with Plaid and MD, not working for me either on any of my accounts with Fidelity. Given the age of the problem and the impact it's having on users, can MD not dedicate the resources necessary to fix this once and for all?
480 Posted by dtd on 16 Jun, 2026 04:42 PM
Both mmd's extension and Fidelity/Plaid work for me.
Rather than assuming that this issue must be Moneydance's fault, I disconnected completely and restarted the process, I've attached a pic when I got to account names.