Contact: Laine Williams, (202) 897-4757, [email protected]
July 26, 2024, Washington, DC – The Financial Data and Technology Association of North America (FDATA) submitted to the Canadian House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Finance (FINA) its recommendations in advance of the 2025 budget. Our submission emphasized the need for the rapid and well-governed implementation of Canada’s open banking system and the expansion of open banking into an open finance framework to drive innovation and competition in the financial sector.
We urged the Canadian government to:
- Include language in Budget 2025 to ensure the implementation of Canada’s open banking system, allowing both consumers and small business owners to have full access to its benefits and prioritizing the growth of Canada’s innovation economy.
- Outline the government’s approach to open finance, the next logical step in financial services. Budget 2025 should establish a timeline for expanding the framework to include additional types of financial accounts, ultimately encompassing any financial account controlled by a consumer or small business.
- Ensure that the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) governs the system in a manner that does not inadvertently dissuade smaller entities from participating.
In the submission, FDATA highlighted that Budget 2024’s delivery of Canada’s initial CDB framework marked an important milestone in a long, consultative journey. Budget 2025 should both ensure delivery of open banking in line with the government’s and the market’s expectations and build on this important progress, including unambiguously making small business accounts part of the first phase and ensuring that the FCAC’s enforcement of the system is appropriately tiered based on the size, complexity, and use case of participating entities.
A full copy of the submission is available here.