FDATA North America Options for Governance of Customer-Directed Finance in Canada
Earlier this year, Canada’s Open Banking Advisory Committee submitted recommendations to the Minister of Finance regarding the need for a customer-directed finance regime in Canada. Quite a lot has happened since then – both globally and in the financial technology sector – but the Department of Finance has continued to consider how to deliver customer-directed finance in Canada.
As the department enters the second phase of its consultative process, FDATA North America provided several suggestions that should act as a guide for the deployment of a successful open finance regime, gleaned from experience in other markets.
FDATA North America’s suggested governance models note that the core of any successful framework is a customer data right – and that only government can implement this open finance tenet, and that it is the foundation of every successful customer-directed finance framework globally. The document warns that a customer-directed finance model that defers decisions around data rights to industry results in an ecosystem in which incumbents are further empowered to determine how much control their customers may have over their data – to the detriment of competition, innovation and financial access.
As such, the document proposes governance models with the strong recommendation that industry alone cannot deliver customer-directed finance but can provide technology solutions that meet the policy standards set by government.
FDATA North America’s suggested governance models
ABOUT FDATA NORTH AMERICA
FDATA was heavily involved in the UK Open Banking Working Group in 2015. In 2016, the working group’s output was published by Her Majesty’s Treasury as the Open Banking Standard. FDATA North America was founded in early 2018. Its members collectively provide tens of millions of consumers in Canada, the United States and Mexico with aggregation-based tools to better manage their finances. Existing FDATA North America members include: air (Alliance for Innovative Regulation), API Metrics, Betterment, Direct ID, Envestnet Yodlee, EQ Bank, Experian, Fintech Growth Syndicate, Fiserv, Flinks, Interac, Intuit, Kabbage, Mogo, Morningstsar, M Science, MX, Petal, Plaid, Questrade, Quicken Loans, TransUnion, Trustly, ValidiFI, VoPay, Wealthica, Xero, and others.