Ottawa is forging ahead with open banking under Prime Minister Mark Carney, the head of the agency in charge of its implementation confirmed at a Toronto conference on Tuesday.
Ottawa is forging ahead with open banking under Prime Minister Mark Carney, the head of the agency in charge of its implementation confirmed at a Toronto conference on Tuesday.
Ottawa is forging ahead with open banking under Prime Minister Mark Carney, the head of the agency in charge of its implementation confirmed at a Toronto conference on Tuesday.
The background: The spring federal election threw the fate of open banking into question. In December’s fall economic statement, the federal Liberals committed to launching the framework—which would require banks to share data with accredited fintechs at a customer’s request to power budgeting apps, accounting software and other services—in 2026. But in March, the Liberals replaced Justin Trudeau with Mark Carney as leader, with the new prime minister calling an election shortly after. Fintech and financial regulation were absent from the Liberal platform during the campaign, making it unclear whether Carney would prioritize open banking given the upheaval brought by U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war and threats to Canada’s sovereignty.
FCAC forges ahead: In her first public remarks on open banking since taking the job as commissioner of the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada in November, Shereen Benzvy Miller said the regulator is hard at work on the file. The FCAC is working with the Department of Finance to create rules about consumer protection, privacy, security and other issues, she said. The agency is also creating an accreditation process for fintechs “that allows as many participants as possible.”
Spotlight on screen scraping: Benzvy Miller called screen scraping “an important blemish” on a “generally positive picture” when it comes to financial data sharing. Screen scraping is a workaround fintechs have developed to access bank data in the absence of the secure data feeds that open banking will mandate. It works by having customers share their online banking passwords with a bot that impersonates them and copies their transaction records and other data into a spreadsheet. Screen scraping has been widely criticized as error-prone and insecure—and also very difficult to eliminate without a lot of disruption, since so many fintechs rely on it. Ottawa plans to eventually ban screen scraping after open banking is “fully operational.”
What’s next: Benzvy Miller did not provide an updated timeline for launching open banking. She said the FCAC is working on supervisory guidance “to make sure that industry players understand what’s expected of them.” Benzvy Miller also said “we look forward” to the minister of finance tabling the next round of open banking legislation in Parliament, but did not say when she expects that to happen.
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