Contact: Laine Williams, (202) 897-4757, [email protected]
February 9, 2024 Washington, DC – The Financial Data and Technology Association of North America (FDATA) submitted comments to Canada’s Department of Finance as part of its pre-budget consultations in advance of Budget 2024. Our submission emphasized the necessity for Canada to build upon the inclusion of consumer-driven banking (CDB) in the 2023 Fall Economic Statement, moving towards a fully realized Canadian open finance framework. The letter underscored the significance of CDB as a foundational step towards financial empowerment for consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), fostering a more innovative and competitive financial services marketplace in Canada.
Our letter urged the Canadian government to:
- Legislate a CDB Framework: Introduce specific language in Budget 2024 to legislate the CDB framework, empowering consumers and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with secure access to their financial data, thus ensuring Canada remains competitive in the global financial ecosystem.
- Establish a Robust Governance Entity: Allocate funding for the creation of a new, neutral, and transparent governance entity to oversee the CDB framework. This body should be capable of making quick, binding decisions and be accountable for its actions, ensuring the framework’s success and longevity, and should be tasked with framework management, API auditing, accreditor oversight, technical standards oversight, liability apportionment, and dispute resolution.
- Outline a Vision for Open Finance: Beyond CDB, Budget 2024 should detail the government’s approach to open finance, the next evolution in financial services, which promises to unlock unprecedented market innovation and competition for the benefit of Canadian consumers and SMEs.
In the submission, we also asserted that any CDB governance entity in Canada must be neutral (i.e. not controlled by any particular stakeholder(s) with commercial interests in the ecosystem), transparent (i.e. it invites and considers stakeholder input and subjects its decisions to an open, publicly visible process), nimble (i.e. capable of making binding decisions relatively quickly and without undue bureaucracy), and accountable (i.e. explain its decisions and actions and be subject to judicial oversight and administrative law processes) with all stakeholders in the system agreeing to comply with the decisions and determinations made by the open banking governance entity as a condition of being active in the market.
A full copy of the submission is available here.