MX Applauds White House & CFPB Efforts To Improve Financial Data Access

Today, President Biden issued an executive order encouraging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to issue a rule facilitating the portability of consumer financial transaction data so consumers can more easily switch financial institutions and use new, innovative financial products. We applaud the Biden Administration and the National Economic Council’s efforts and look forward to our continued work together to ensure consumers can access and use their financial data.

We would like all Americans, regardless of where they choose to bank, make payments, or borrow, to have access to modern connectivity that safeguards their data and their deposits. This means secure access to all of their financial data, and the ability to share it with providers of their choice, ensuring the best solutions for them and their families.

We believe that regulations put into place under Dodd-Frank Section 1033 rulemaking should: 

1. Establish a consumer data right that assigns ownership to the consumer. 
2. Ensure that financial institutions and fintechs cannot block access to data except under clearly defined instances. Blocking access to prevent concrete instances of fraud is within the interest of the consumer, but blocking access merely because one believes a product might be used for fraud may not be in the interest of the consumer, especially when doing so also serves the unstated purpose of making financial products less competitive.
3. Provide regulatory oversight for financial intermediaries and aggregators. Their role is systemically important in providing one-to-many connectivity and enabling ongoing innovation. 
4. Provide clear guidance on liability and who makes a consumer whole in case of a breach or other financial harm. Currently under Regulation E, this falls to the financial institution where the data was stored.

For Consumers: 

Implementing these imperatives will give consumers confidence that the data they want to share is complete, transportable, secure, and that in the event of a breach or other loss, they will be protected. This will give them safe and reliable access to a broad range of financial services applications that will empower their financial futures. 

For the Industry:

There are enormous benefits to the whole ecosystem - including increased security, decreased risk and a fundamental shift to the creation of new revenue opportunities from API based services, like Banking As A Service (BAAS). The transparency provided with secure data sharing means that institutions of all sizes will have insights into the business impacts of their customers' data sharing activities - and be able to better expand services to suit. In turn, sparking new companies to emerge and compete and bringing further optionality to the consumer for their financial decisions.

MX is leading the industry with secure data access, with successful migration away from credential based data access to secure APIs for the majority of the people on the MX platform. Through agreements with the largest financial institutions and collaborations with key partners, MX has been setting the bar for secure data access for both consumers and the industry.

Earlier this year, MX joined financial institutions, fintechs and technology companies in responding to the CFPB’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) regarding financial records data access under Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act. Read our full response.

Jane Barratt, Chief Advocacy Officer at MX