As third-party access to consumer financial data expands, regulators balance innovation, customer choice, and data protection.

By Brett Carr, Charles Weinstein, and Deric Behar

Consumers’ rights to access and use their personal financial information has been a key focus of innovators and regulators over the past decade.

The development of “open banking” fintech models has proliferated, as customers discover the value in allowing third-party financial service providers to access dispersed personal data through the use of either credential sharing and “screen scraping” or application programming interfaces (APIs), which allow systems and applications to communicate in a more prescribed way without credential sharing.