FDATA Submits Comments to Canada’s Department of Finance Pre-Budget Consultations 2025

Washington, DC, August 13, 2025 – The Financial Data and Technology Association (FDATA), a trade association representing more than 30 financial technology companies and consumer-permissioned data access platforms in Canada and the United States, today submitted comments to Canada’s Department of Finance as part of its pre-budget consultations in advance of Budget 2025. 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:

Implement Consumer-Driven Finance without further delay. Seven years after the Government first committed to developing an open finance regime, Canada has made only limited progress. FDATA called on the Government to use Budget 2025 to rapidly implement a well-governed, interoperable, and regulatorily harmonized Consumer-Driven Finance system that empowers consumers and small businesses, boosts innovation, and enhances Canada’s global competitiveness.

Adopt critical structural reforms to ensure the regime works as intended. FDATA recommended a series of improvements to the initial framework launched under Budget 2024, including:

• Affirmatively including small business accounts in the scope of the first phase of implementation;
• Expanding participation to provincially regulated institutions to enable a truly national and competitive marketplace;
• Designating the Bank of Canada—not the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada—as the governing body to avoid fragmented oversight;
• Creating a tiered, harmonized accreditation model that supports fintech and startup participation; and
• Clarifying enforcement processes and scaling penalties based on company size and violation severity, with clear appeal rights to avoid discouraging innovation.

FDATA also emphasized that regulatory harmonization across jurisdictions is essential to avoiding duplication and ensuring scalability. We called for amending the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act to establish a legally binding data access and sharing right for consumers and SMEs across financial, utility, and telecommunications sectors.

A copy of FDATA’s submission is available here.