At the EACB, we've taken a deep dive into the key building blocks outlined in the Open Finance Report of the Commission’s Expert Group on European financial data space, exploring lists of customer data fields, consent management tools, APIs, cost of data sharing, level playing field, and link with review of PSD2 and more. Our thorough analysis has led us to formulate a set of recommendations that we believe can help the European Commission develop a sustainable open finance framework.
- Carefully assess the potential benefits and drawbacks before implementing mandatory or voluntary lists of customer data fields in addition to the GDPR requirements.
- Consider the use of API interfaces, which can leverage the technological foundation developed in previous years as a starting point instead of introducing data perimeters spelling out categories of data expected to be used for a specific use case as this may stifle further use case development, be technically complex and challenging to implement.
- Allow data holders to offer consent management tools to customers on a voluntary basis.
- Prefer a flexible and market-driven approach when it comes to the adoption of standardised APIs.
- Encourage and support contractual data exchange, where liability arrangements for the use of data are clearly specified in contracts, and liability allocation is based on transparent principles that do not create extra risks for data holders.
- Fairly distribute the costs for creating data access among different players in the data value chain in order to safeguard competition and allow compensation between the data holder and third parties to form freely in the market rather than being prescribed by legislation.
- Ensure that, in situations where data access rights are imposed, non-bank third parties intending to provide or benefit from financial services data are authorised.
- Regarding the mortgage and investment use cases discussed in the Report, for the former, we recommend conducting a comprehensive impact assessment to identify any market failures and conducting a cost-benefit analysis. In the case of investment use, we advise against standardising the client exploration and personal asset allocation processes, as this may lead to a loss of quality in customer assessment and hinder institutions’ efforts to improve their processes. Instead, institutions should focus on providing specialized and customized service offerings to their customers.
- Notwithstanding the possibility to introduce the concept of compensation in line with the Commission proposal for a Data Act, we recommend against bringing Account Information Service Providers (AISPs) within the scope of the open finance framework and removing them from the PSD2 scope at this time. Such a shift could frustrate the significant investments already made towards getting the implementation of PSD2 right and could potentially disrupt the technical market equilibrium that has been established, without necessarily improving outcomes for Account Servicing Payment Service Providers (ASPSPs), AISPs, or Payment Service Users (PSUs).