This member spotlight features Lisa Novier, Head of Governance, Risk and Compliance at Envestnet Data Analytics. Lisa tells us how Envestnet’s role in providing connectivity of consumer-permissioned financial data is critical in realizing the full potential of this data and explains Envestnet’s high level of engagement with policymakers to promote finalization of the Dodd-Frank Section 1033 rulemaking.
March 6, 2023, Washington, DC – FDATA North America and its 30+ member companies today released a set of principles to govern the usage, disclosures, liability, oversight, and technology involved in open finance ecosystems. Upon release of these new principles, FDATA North America Executive Director Steve Boms said:
“As policymakers in both Canada and the United States contemplate open finance and federal data privacy frameworks, FDATA North America’s members are pleased to have collaborated on a set of privacy principles that we hope will inform their work. Today’s release is a detailed and comprehensive set of principles which we intend to serve as critical guideposts for legislators and regulators in the U.S. and Canada as they undertake the important work of creating modernized, customer-centric financial services regulatory environments.”
The first section of this document includes definitions of data types, and requirements for minimization, secondary usage, and silent parties. The second section covers consumers disclosures, what elements they should include, their length, and options for consumer revocation. The third section discusses assessments of data breach liability, notification requirements, and consumer redress. The fourth section covers regulatory oversight, and suggests which regulators in the U.S. and Canada should be granted supervisory authority over data privacy to ensure that consumers, data providers, and third-parties are protected and acting responsibly. The final section covers the technology involved in user authentication and authorization, and how they can be changed and revoked by consumers.
A high-level summary of these principles is available here. The full set of these principles is available here and can be shared with attribution.
This month’s member spotlight features Mit Shah, COO and Co-Founder of Method Financial, who explains how Method’s technology allows customers to securely permission their financial data to third-party providers of their choosing without having to use traditional credential-based methods:
Welcome to FDATA North America’s monthly newsletter! These regular dispatches will share developments from our organization and our 30+ member companies, all of which are promoting financial access and inclusion with open finance use cases. We also include a list of upcoming industry events, and coverage of any market developments that impact fintech innovators.
Know someone who’d like to receive these monthly updates? Send them here to sign up!
This month’s member spotlight features Mit Shah, COO and Co-Founder of Method Financial, who explains how Method’s technology allows customers to securely permission their financial data to third-party providers of their choosing without having to use traditional credential-based methods:
FDATA Welcomes GoCardless and Method Financial as New Members. FDATA is happy to welcome two new member companies this month: GoCardless and Method Financial. GoCardless is a direct bank payment platform that streamlines both one-time and recurring payments, can collect payments from 30+ countries quickly and securely, and easily integrates into over 350 other business systems. Method Financial is an embedded banking service that allows developers to easily retrieve and pay any of their users’ debts through a single API, which provides access to 15,000+ lenders in the US, covering 95% of consumer debt.
FDATA Submits Comment Letter in Response to CFPB Section 1033 SBREFA Outline of Proposals for Consideration. On January 25th, FDATA submitted a comment letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in response to its Outline of Proposals for Consideration for the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA) implementing Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act. FDATA North America has long advocated for the CFPB to issue a rule implementing Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act using the best information available from the broadest number of market stakeholders possible. We commend the CFPB for outlining a strong series of proposals that, when implemented, will create a more competitive, more accessible, and more inclusive financial services marketplace. Our letter also encouraged the CFPB to broaden the scope of covered accounts and covered recipients under the rule to maximize its impact, among other important improvements we suggest the Bureau to consider. FDATA North America looks forward to continuing our positive engagement with the CFPB as this rulemaking process continues.
Save the Dates: FDATA to Host Two Upcoming Summits in the US and Canada. FDATA North America will be hosting two Open Banking summits in 2023. The first will be held in Washington, DC, on April 20th, and the second in Ottawa, Canada on May 17th. These events will feature influential speakers, unique networking opportunities, and in-depth conversations with policymakers, public officials, and subject-matter experts from FDATA and its member companies. Stay tuned for more details, including registration, sponsorship opportunities, and speakers, in the coming weeks!
Codat was recognized in OpenFutureWorld’s annual Open Finance Global Rankings of the organizations, countries, and individuals leading progress in open finance around the world.
Flinks has published an “Open Banking Glossary” of the most frequently used terminologies in North American open banking that will be regularly updated.
MX’s Vice President for Strategic Accounts & New Markets Matt West joined the Fintech Insider podcast to discuss the journey from Open Banking to Open Finance to date, and the challenges and opportunities for developing a truly global system.
Plaid Co-Founder and CEO Zach Perret joined several of his colleagues for an hour-long discussion of their 2023 fintech predictions, including developments in crypto, the FedNow system, and if open finance is going to finally “take off” in the U.S.
Trustly CEO Alex Gonthier was featured in a Leaders in Payments Podcast episode discussing the Trustly origin story, its core mission, and its vision for the future as well as where he sees the industry going in the next two to three years as it relates to real-time payments, crypto, blockchain, and stablecoin. Trustly also released this whitepaper which helps merchants understand the true cost of card acceptance and how to lower processing costs.
Vopay published a new post on its blog entitled “The Need For Speed: How FinTech Is Addressing Lending’s Biggest Pain Points,” which explained the many diverse benefits of faster payment options, including reduction of NSF fees and rapid loan disbursements.
Xero’s Chief Product Officer Anna Curzon spoke with BetaKit to explain the challenges of building what she calls a “purposeful platform” for small businesses, and mentioned how the limited development of open banking in Canada is a persistent barrier to developing new products.
FDATA North America Submits Comment Letter in Response to CFPB Section 1033 SBREFA Outline of Proposals for Consideration
Contact: Justin Santopietro; [email protected]
January 25, 2023, Washington, DC – The Financial Data and Technology Association (FDATA) of North America submitted a comment letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in response to its Outline of Proposals for Consideration for the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA) implementing Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act. Upon filing the comment letter, Executive Director Steve Boms said:
“As an organization representing more than 30 financial technology and data aggregation companies, FDATA North America has long advocated for the CFPB to issue a rule implementing Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act using the best information available from the broadest number of market stakeholders possible. We commend the CFPB for outlining a strong series of proposals that, when implemented, will create a more competitive, more accessible, and more inclusive financial services marketplace. As it prepares to issue a proposed rule implementing Section 1033, we encourage the CFPB to broaden the scope of covered accounts and covered recipients under the rule to maximize its impact, among other important improvements we suggest the Bureau to consider. We look forward to continuing our positive engagement with the CFPB as this rulemaking process continues.”
While FDATA’s comment letter expressed support for all the proposals in the SBREFA outline, it also urged the CFPB to expand the scope of this rulemaking by:
Over the past several years, FDATA has repeatedly urged the CFPB to advance a Section 1033 rulemaking, including in its response to the CFPB’s October 2020 Section 1033 Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) and last years’ CFPB Request for Information (RFI) on so-called “Junk Fees.” FDATA North America has also advocated for a Section 1033 rulemaking through comment letters to other federal agencies, including its response to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s and Federal Reserve’s Proposed Interagency Guidance on Third-Party Risk Management, and to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in response to its draft report on Cybersecurity Considerations for Open banking Technology and Emerging Standards.
Welcome to FDATA North America’s monthly newsletter! These regular dispatches will share developments from our organization and our 30+ member companies, all of which are promoting financial access and inclusion with open finance use cases. We also include a list of upcoming industry events, and coverage of any market developments that impact fintech innovators.
Know someone who’d like to receive these monthly updates? Send them here to sign up!
Save the Dates: FDATA to Host Two Upcoming Summits in the US and Canada. FDATA North America will be hosting two Open Banking summits in 2023. The first will be held in Washington, DC, on April 20th, and the second in Ottawa, Canada on May 17th. These events will feature influential speakers, unique networking opportunities, and in-depth conversations with policymakers, public officials, and subject-matter experts from FDATA and its member companies. Stay tuned for more details, including registration, sponsorship opportunities, and speakers, in the coming weeks!
APIMetrics CEO David O’Neill spoke at API Days Paris, where he explained how his company deploys industry-leading best practices for monitoring API functionality and security.
Atomic Financial CEO Jordan Wright appeared in a spotlight video produced by Atomic’s partner Galileo Financial Technologies, where he explained how their payroll API systems are designed to help the most financially vulnerable.
Basis Theory CEO Colin Luce joined Money 20/20 on its “Money Pot” podcast to discuss how to “end the strife” between data security and innovation. Luce also explained how Basis Theory’s technology can change the nature of data security and compliance.
Codat published on its blog a case-study of how financial services provider Ampla used Codat’s universal API to streamline its underwriting and analytics. To assess and track customers’ financial health, Ampla needed instant, ongoing access to business data through its commerce, retail, and accounting systems. Initially, Ampla tried to build the required integrations in-house, placing undue burden on its development team. Ampla leveraged Codat’s token migration feature to transfer hundreds of active connections from their in-house Shopify integration to Codat’s API—without their customers having to reconnect. From there, it joined a number of other integrations, delivering standardized data from multiple commerce and accounting systems directly into Ampla’s platform.
Envestnet Data & Analytics published a new survey which shows that clients who use data aggregation services are more loyal to the wealth and investment management firms that provide these services and are more likely to use their products in the future. The survey data also shows Envestnet clients who use financial apps and tools powered by their aggregated data are even more loyal, with more than 90 percent saying they would log in and use their wealth management firms’ site or app more frequently.
Flinks founder and COO Frederick Lavoie was interviewed at OBExpo Canada 2022. Lavoie said he expects there will be a series of Canadian financial institutions, some of them large, that will adopt formal, API-driven Open Banking and be in production within the next 12-18 months, regardless of the government’s ongoing efforts to build an Open Banking regime.
M Science received Benzinga’s Global Fintech Award and was named the Best Financial Research Company.
MX published a new blog post entitled, “Checking the lists…Safeguarding consumer data sharing,” which explained how the pending consumer data right regulations in the United States and Canada will require account providers to: give consumers visibility into when third parties use their data; grant access to the data they want, when they want; and revoke access with ease.
Plaid recently hosted a webinar with the American Banker to discuss the future of open finance. The event featured industry experts from Plaid, the Consumer Bankers Association, and the American Bankers Association who discussed why consumer demand is driving U.S. digital financial innovation, how open finance unlocks new opportunities for financial institutions, competition and connectivity, deepening bank-fintech partnerships, and building a safer, more trustworthy financial services ecosystem. A video recap of the event and review of the key takeaways and insights for how financial institutions can set a strategy for open banking success is now available on Plaid’s blog.
Questrade was named Best Canadian Brokerage by leading financial media outlet Benzinga at its Global Fintech Awards. A seasoned group of judges, including editorial staff, industry leaders, and advisors in the fintech space, vetted, nominated, and picked the winners in each category. The awards are judged based on criteria including innovation, performance, functionality, impact, and audience appeal. “We are honored to be recognized on the international stage as the leading brokerage in Canada,” said Edward Kholodenko, president and CEO, Questrade. “We are proud of our achievements during these challenging times, and believe it reflects our ongoing commitment to help Canadians ultimately become more financially successful and secure, through our investments in technology, financial empowerment, and customer service.”
Trustly’s blog featured a special guest post from its partner Cross River Bank entitled, “Making Real-Time Payments a Reality Through Partnerships,” which detailed the state of real-time payments in the United States, shared the latest data on the strong growth of these payments, made some predictions about future growth, and explained how Cross River and Trustly are working to make real-time payments more accessible.
Vaultree’s CEO and Co-Founder Ryan Lasmaili conducted an interview with the cybersecurity blog Enterprise Security Tech to discuss Vaultree’s mission, how it is tackling the growing problem of data breaches, and how its technical breakthroughs in encryption, search, and processing has improved third-party operational performance and reduced disruption of data access.
Vopay published a year-in-review blog post entitled, “The Top Payment Takeaways From 2022 and What To Watch For In 2023,” which recapped the many advancements in the payments industry, including how the expansion of open banking has made account-to-account (A2A) payments faster, easier, cheaper, and more secure.
Welcome to FDATA North America’s monthly newsletter! These regular dispatches will share developments from our organization and our 30+ member companies, all of which are promoting financial access and inclusion with open finance use cases. We also include a list of upcoming industry events, and coverage of any market developments that impact fintech innovators.
Know someone who’d like to receive these monthly updates? Send them here to sign up!
This month’s Member Spotlight features Christine Day, Chief Information Officer at Questrade, who explains the myriad ways that consumer-permissioned data sharing can add value, lower costs, increase competition, and increase personalization of a wide variety of financial products and services:
FDATA Applauds CFPB’s Release of Small Business Panel Proposals for Section 1033 Rulemaking. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has published proposals for the upcoming Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA) panel for the Dodd-Frank Section 1033 rulemaking, and FDATA applauds the CFPB for this timely release. This outline marks the first concrete step toward implementation of an open finance system in the United States and affirms that consumers should have complete control over their financial data. If implemented, the framework envisioned within the outline will strongly align with the goals that FDATA North America has long supported: a national, technology-neutral financial data portability standard that will allow consumers to select in a more competitive ecosystem from the financial services providers that can best improve their financial wellbeing. FDATA North America commends the CFPB staff and Director Chopra for their diligent work and looks forward to working with the CFPB to promote an expansive, customer-centric proposed rule to implement Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act. FDATA is in the process of preparing a comment letter to submit to the CFPB following completion of the SBREFA meetings.
Atomic Financial, a provider of payroll connectivity, announced that it is expanding its solutions suite beyond consumer-permissioned access to support connectivity for employer and human resource administrative systems. By offering broader integration options, Atomic aims to give customers the most comprehensive coverage, faster time from integration to go-live, and a vastly improved product experience when it comes to connecting with HR systems. This development makes Atomic the first to market with payroll connectivity integrations and authentications for both consumers and businesses to permission access to financial data in payroll systems and human resource platforms. Atomic’s EmployerLink solutions will initially support use cases for worker’s compensation insurance, earned wage access (EWA), and employer benefits.
Basis Theory’s co-founder Colin Luce joined Remy Blaire on Fintech.tv to discuss how companies use tokenization to handle financial data protection and compliance.
Codat published a new blog post entitled “What makes SMBs willing to share data with financial providers?” that shared their research showing 67 percent of SMB borrowers expressed willingness to share their financial data with credit providers. Codat’s research also shows that growing businesses and those open to alternative lenders are even more willing to share financial data, and that the ability to access better loan rates was the largest incentive for data sharing.
Envestnet’s Group President of Data & Analytics Farouk Ferchichi penned an article in Finextra entitled “We Must Accelerate Open Banking to Help Withstand Today’s Economic Volatility” which outlined how open banking can offer quick and reliable visibility of personal finances and gives users a more secure and seamless way to connect their financial accounts. They also produced an on-demand webinar entitled “Protecting customers, their data, and your business from financial fraud with account tokens” about how sensitive financial data can be protected from hackers and how complex account verification processes can be simplified via open banking.
Flinks published a new blog post by its product marketer Alex Coleman entitled “OAuth Performance: Improve User Experience and Increase Conversions” that describes how OAuth technology enables Flinks’ end users to connect their bank accounts to a chosen fintech without sharing credentials. This educational post includes screenshots and descriptions of of their authentication/onboarding flow, and describes hows OAuth eliminates errors and barriers from traditional login systems, such as password changes and multi-factor authorization.
MX’s Chief Advocacy Officer Jane Barratt joined Jim Marous on the Financial Brand to discuss how data and insight can transform banking into emotional relationships that can impact people, organizations, and communities. MX also published a video from their recent Money Experience Summit entitled “How Lenders Can Meet Borrower Expectations in Today’s Financial Climate” that featured discussion on how customer expectations of instant-access to a wide variety of products and services is driving further fintech innovation.
Petal’s Prism Data, an open banking analytics platform, recently introduced CashScore v3, a powerful new version of its CashScore credit scoring model that leverages anonymized, consumer-permissioned open banking data to fully illuminate a consumer’s true credit risk. CashScore v3 is the first-ever consortium-based cash flow underwriting model, built using millions of anonymized, consumer-permissioned records from a variety of different banks, credit products and customer segments. Similar to traditional models like FICO or VantageScore, Prism’s consortium-based CashScore v3 offers lenders a highly predictive tool they can use off-the-shelf to more precisely assess credit risk in any consumer context—from credit cards and personal loans to mortgages and auto loans, among others.
Plaid’s John Anderson, Head of Payments, joined the Payments Journal Podcast alongside Mark Smith, Head of Payments Business and Market Development at AWS, and Tim Sloane, Vice President of Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group. The group discussed how data connectivity is empowering the democratization of payments, improving consumer experience, and constantly driving new use cases. Anderson also penned a post on Plaid’s blog on the subject of “safer, smarter, faster” bank payments.
Trustly’s Rick Costello, Head of Digital Commerce, spoke with Rethink Retail at NACS online about what Trustly’s open banking payments solutions can do for merchants, particularly in the convenience store business, including reducing payment fees and risks.
Vaultree’s Pedro Aravena wrote a post on the Dev forum entitled “What is the difference between API and SKD?” that explained the difference between APIs and SKDs. APIs perform the integration between systems and SKDs make it possible to create an application and can couple APIs — but not the other way around.
Vopay published a real-time payment guide intended for Canadian business owners looking to learn more about real-time payment technology. The guide explains the operations and advantages of real-time payments, and makes some predictions for their future.
This Member Spotlight features Christine Day, Chief Information Officer at Questrade, who explains the myriad ways that consumer-permissioned data sharing can add value, lower costs, increase competition, and increase personalization of a wide variety of financial products and services:
This month’s Member Spotlight features Cathy Ly, Vice President of Customer Experience and Operations, who tells us how challenger banks like EQ rely on customer-permissioned data access to offer custom and competitive financial services to a wide array of Canadians:
Welcome to FDATA North America’s monthly newsletter! These regular dispatches will share developments from our organization and our 30+ member companies, all of which are promoting financial access and inclusion with open finance use cases. We also include a list of upcoming industry events, and coverage of any market developments that impact fintech innovators.
Know someone who’d like to receive these monthly updates? Send them here to sign up!
This month’s Member Spotlight features Cathy Ly, Vice President of Customer Experience and Operations, who tells us how challenger banks like EQ rely on customer-permissioned data access to offer custom and competitive financial services to a wide array of Canadians:
FDATA Applauds CFPB’s Release of Small Business Panel Proposals for Section 1033 Rulemaking. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has published proposals for the upcoming Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA) panel for the Dodd-Frank Section 1033 rulemaking, and FDATA is applauding the CFPB for this timely release. This outline marks the first concrete step towards the implementation of an open finance system in the United States and affirms that consumers should have complete control over their financial data. If implemented, the framework envisioned within the outline will strongly align with the goals that FDATA North America has long supported: a national, technology-neutral financial data portability standard that will allow consumers to select in a more competitive ecosystem from the financial services providers that can best improve their financial wellbeing. We applaud the CFPB staff and Director Chopra for their diligent work and look forward to working with the CFPB to promote an expansive, customer-centric proposed rule to implement Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act.
FDATA Highlights Importance of API Standards and Monitoring. As both Canada and the United States continue to move toward open banking via APIs, it is essential that minimum API standards be set in open banking frameworks to ensure that consumers and SMEs have uninterrupted access to their financial data. To this end, FDATA has developed four principles that will be critical to the design of a well-implemented API environment in North America. These principles cover data scope, reliability standards, fallback options, and the necessity of establishing a neutral monitoring agency.
Codat published an article in Fintech Times explaining how open banking could be the key to reducing the funding gap for small businesses. Codat uses its recent research, which found a negative attitude toward available financing options among SME decisionmakers.
DirectID recently announced a partnership with SME capital provider GOT CAPITAL, which will allow SMEs applying for financing to use the power of Open Banking within the application journey and allow agents at Got Capital to quickly categorize and determine businesses’ true revenue without the need for PDF or paper bank statements. This new solution will allow for a much faster and accurate process, de-risking the financing while providing a better experience for SMEs.
Fiserv’s Vice Chairman Frank Sanchez joined the Tearsheet Podcast to discuss the promise and challenges associated with next generation cores, how fintechs are leveraging them in pushing open finance forward, what sets them apart from legacy banking cores, and what innovations we can anticipate in the near future.
Flinks published a new blog post by its product marketer Alex Coleman entitled, “Open Banking: Building or Buying,” which describs the state of open banking in several nations and explains the role of data intermediaries, particularly data aggregators, in establishing connectivity between financial institutions and consumers and SMEs.
Interac sponsored an event in Ottawa on open banking. Hosted by The Globe and Mail, the event featured panels that discussed the framing of open banking, data privacy and security, and accreditation and liability. Abraham Tachjian, Canada’s Open Banking Lead, closed the event by discussing what’s next for open banking now that the work of the working groups is coming to a close.
Kabbage was listed as a winner for this year’s IBSIntelligence NeoChallenger Bank Awards 2022. This recognition showcases its commitment to backing small businesses through innovative and impactful banking technology.
Morningstar ByAllAccounts published a whitepaper entitled “Open Banking for Wealth Management in the United States,” which advocates for open baking within the investment and wealth management sphere. The whitepaper explains how today’s open banking direct data connections provide reliable and secure access to the critical data necessary to provide personalized advice and maximize positive client outcomes.
MX’s Bose Chan, Head of Strategic Partnerships, joined the LiminalStrategy State of Identity podcast with Cameron D’Ambrosi to discuss what open banking means for banks, how it differs from end users or non-banking entities, and what to consider when building open banking capabilities.
Plaid’s Ginger Baker wrote a post for their blog entitled, “Access to financial data helps consumers navigate a difficult economy.” The post detailed how the growth of fintech adoption will increase the role that financial service providers have in helping their consumers tap into the benefits of data connectivity. The post included a link to Plaid’s recently published report, “The Fintech Effect: Stability, Impact, and Building for the Future,” which offers the latest data on consumer trends and insights on the future of digital finance.
Petal was named to CB Insight’s Fintech 250 list of most promising fintech companies around the world and Tracxn’s Emerging Startups 2022: Top Payment Startups.
Trustly welcomed back its founder Alex Gonthier, who will now operate as CEO of its Americas division. They were also featured in FinExtra’s first-ever North American 2023 Digital Banking Report where Nate Marquiss, Trustly’s Head of Finance, gave his expert take on what the future holds for Open Banking. They also published this blog post which highlights some key takeaways from this year’s G2E Summit, where they explored the future of all things Open Banking in the Gaming industry.
Vaultree has been shortlisted as one of the Top 50 global startups for the 4 Years From Now (#4YFN23) Awards 2023.
Vopay CEO Hamed Arbabi wrote an article for Fintech.Ca entitled, “Financial Inclusion Is Our Next Economy,” which detailed the reasons why many Americans remain unbanked, the risk of a cashless society, and how consumers could be better served by digital financial services.