Standards Wars
In 1994, Intuit the leader in personal financial software acquired the National Payment Clearinghouse Inc., an electronic bill payments vendor, and set up a proprietary network for home banking and electronic bill payment. With an installed base of almost seven million Quicken customers, Intuit was poised to define the future of banking and payments. That same year, Microsoft conceded defeat of its own product, Microsoft Money, and made a $1.5 billion (increased to $2 billion) bid to acquire Intuit. Microsoft wanted to dominate the personal finance software market and with it, electronic banking. The U.S. Department of Justice opposed the deal and Microsoft backed off.
By 1996, Intuit had recognized the difficulties of running a bill payments service. Its proprietary payments service was a drag on its resources; additionally, Intuit wanted to move to the Internet rather than perpetuate proprietary standards. In September 1996, Intuit sold off its bill payments service to CheckFree in exchange for a stake in CheckFree, which in turn inherited the biller and customer base of Intuit’s payments service. At the same time, Microsoft was working on a joint venture with First Data Corp., one of the largest credit card issuers and processors in the world, to create an electronic bill presentment and processing service. The venture, called MSFDC, planned to compete with Intuit and CheckFree.
As Intuit and Microsoft were racing onto the Internet, they agreed to collaborate with CheckFree on putting together a common standard called Open Financial Exchange (OFX). OFX provided a common system for financial institutions, businesses, and consumers to conduct transactions electronically over the Internet. Taking what had been three separate standards (the evolving
MSFDC and Intuit standards and CheckFree’s EBPP standard), they created in January 1997 one open standard accessible to anyone. OFX, which was controlled by an industry-wide steering committee, was quickly adopted by a large number of financial institutions.