MoneyPatrol joins the Open Finance working group
Why we are getting more involved in the standards that shape your data rights.
This week MoneyPatrol joined the Open Finance working group as a contributing member. Open Finance is the loose coalition of banks, fintechs, regulators, and consumer-rights groups working on the standards that govern how your financial data moves between institutions — and who gets to see it.
We are joining because the rules being written this year will shape what apps like ours can do for the next decade. Sitting it out felt like a mistake.
What "Open Finance" actually means
Open Finance is the next chapter after Open Banking. Open Banking, which became real in the U.K. and EU between 2018 and 2020, gave consumers the right to share their checking and savings data with third parties via secure APIs instead of by handing over login credentials. Open Finance extends the same principle to the rest of the financial picture: investments, mortgages, pensions, insurance, credit, and increasingly tax and payroll data.
In the U.S., Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act and the CFPB's 2024 Personal Financial Data Rights rule are doing the same work, more slowly and with more legal noise. The technical standards are being negotiated right now. They will determine, for years, how cleanly your data flows, how much friction your bank can put in the way, and what protections you have if something goes wrong.
What we are pushing for
We came in with a short list of positions. Three of them matter most to MoneyPatrol users:
1. Read access should be free and unfettered. Some banks are floating the idea of charging fintechs per-API-call to read consumer data. That cost would inevitably show up in subscription prices. We oppose any per-call pricing for basic read access. Your data should move freely when you tell it to.
2. Consent should be granular and revocable in one click. Today, "I authorize this app to see my accounts" is often a take-it-or-leave-it grant. We are pushing for granular consent (this account, not that one; balances only, not transaction history) and a single revoke button that propagates instantly across the ecosystem.
3. Standards should preserve room for innovation. A perfectly standardized data feed that locks in 2024-era categories would be a disaster for the AI features we and others are building. We are arguing for a stable core schema with extensible fields — the same pattern that worked for the web.
What this does not change
To be explicit: joining the working group does not change anything about how MoneyPatrol handles your data today. Our security posture, our privacy practices, and our zero-credential-storage model are unchanged. We do not see your bank passwords, we never have, and the new standards will only reinforce that.
What changes is our seat at the table. Working-group membership gets us into the discussions where the rules are written, not just the comment periods after the rules are proposed. That is a meaningful difference.
What you can do
If you care about how your financial data is governed:
- The CFPB's Personal Financial Data Rights rulemaking has open public comment periods. The comments that get cited most are the specific ones with concrete examples, not the form letters.
- The Financial Data Exchange (FDX) publishes drafts of the technical standards. They are dense but readable.
- Your bank likely has a public position on these issues. Asking them is, by itself, useful pressure.
The longer view
The reason we care about this work is the same reason MoneyPatrol exists. Personal finance got hard not because the math is hard, but because the data lives in a hundred places and is structured to be useful to the institution holding it, not to the person earning it. Open Finance, done right, narrows that gap. Done wrong, it codifies it.
We will publish updates as the work proceeds. If you have specific concerns you want us to raise, the in-app feedback button reaches the team that attends these meetings.
MoneyPatrol is not a financial, tax, investment, legal or accounting advisor. This article is for general educational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalised advice from a qualified professional. See our full disclaimer.