The two sides in what once threatened to become a standardization war announced details last week of a plan to unify some of the thorny technical aspects of their approaches to home banking.
The rival specifications-Open Financial Exchange and Gold-are to converge by summer in a new standard, still to be named.
This is expected to simplify financial institutions' task of electronically linking customers to their accounts via personal computers.
The standard will be published under the auspices of the Banking Industry Technology Secretariat, the division of the Bankers Roundtable known as BITS.
In keeping with its mission to coordinate industry responses on potentially sensitive technological issues, the secretariat will be responsible for mediating disputes and, through an independent standards- setting body, for certifying vendors.
"This wouldn't have happened had BITS not intervened," said Catherine A. Allen, the organization's chief executive officer.
"Unless there is a user with a business requirement, (technology companies) don't have an incentive" to clear up confusion in this way, she said. "In fact, they have an incentive" to push their own specs.
There was even more chaos initially. Microsoft Corp. and Intuit Inc. came together with Checkfree Corp. in January 1997, saying they would converge their respective protocols into Open Financial Exchange, or OFX.
The Gold alternative came from the Integrion Financial Network consortium and its lead technology provider, International Business Machines Corp. The latter expressed a desire to "interoperate" with OFX, but change came slowly as each side lobbied for its preferences.
"This has taken so long because we had an installed base of people that had built to both OFX and Gold," said Matt Cone, business development manager at Microsoft.
Rather than develop something new from scratch, technical teams from both sides met weekly with the BITS staff to design an "upgrade path" that would enable each system's users to adopt new software that would be cross- compatible.
"The term we used was 'minimize the breakage,'" said David S. Fortney, director of product development for Integrion.
He used the analogy of rotary and touch-tone telephones: "To make (the different dialing methods) interoperable, you need to make sure the phone number is the same."
Preliminary Gold-OFX documentation is expected in June, with a final version published in August.
Backers of the single standard said it will combine the best elements of both predecessors. For example, OFX's bill presentment capabilities would meld with Gold's extensive customer support features.
But one vendor expressed concern that PC banking's momentum could slow.
"People four months into an OFX implementation are asking if they should wait for a merged protocol," said Eric Jacobson, president of Home Financial Network Inc. "These delays are a concern. Every time there is a change, people stop, wait, look around, and make sure that everyone is doing everything right."
Its products already compatible with OFX, Home Financial Network last week said its Home ATM software was certified for Gold as well.
There is inevitable talk about winners and losers. BancAmerica Robertson Stephens analyst Gary Craft said, "Integrion has yielded to OFX."
"Although I wouldn't say that one dominated over the other, it is safe to say that some of the smaller credit unions and regional banks were paying more attention to OFX because of the ease of implementation with a tool kit Microsoft was providing," said Chris P. Melancon, a product manager in Citicorp's advanced development group and a member of the BITS group involved in the convergence.
