Transitioning from Open Banking to Open Finance: DIGITALEUROPE’s position on the Financial Data Access Regulation (FIDA)

DIGITALEUROPE supports the shift from Open Banking to Open Finance through an expansion of strategic data-sharing partnerships. The Financial Data Access Regulation (FIDA) can bring multiple benefits to the EU economy and society, contributing to financial inclusion, enhanced transparency, accessibility and accountability for consumers, and ultimately, building trust in data–sharing in the financial services industry.  

FIDA should provide industry with the necessary incentives and tools it needs to productively engage in data-sharing.

Any data-sharing framework should be voluntary, customer-centric and cross-sectoral to harness the potential of the data economy. This includes alignment with the Data Act – to avoid asymmetries to the detriment of the financial sector. This also includes granting industry sufficient time to develop data-sharing schemes. A too-short timeline leading to the Commission adopting binding data-sharing measures via a Delegated Act to specify the modalities will lead to inconsistent schemes that are not fit for purpose.

It is vital to improve FIDA. We call on the EU to focus on the following:

• Data-sharing schemes: Establish minimum requirements to develop schemes, to avoid a patchwork of different rules and modalities per schemes and increase the timeline for industry to develop schemes (Art.9).
• Customer data: Provide a clear and unambiguous definition of customer data in scope, to be made available by data holders. The scope should explicitly exclude derived, inferred, or otherwise further processed data (Art.3(3)).
• Legal certainty on the rights and obligations for data holders and data users: The definitions of data holders and data users should be clarified to for instance prevent a situation where a data user might become a data holder by simply accessing or collecting customer data.
• Alignment with the Payment Services Regulation (PSR) Proposal: FIDA and the PSR must be aligned in their obligations for data holders to make available permission dashboards for customers/data owners (Art. 8).
• Compensation: Ensure that FIDA allows for compensation models that allow both for data holders to be compensated for making data available and managing data access, providing incentives at the industry level, as well as a model that allows data users to participate in the Schemes (Art.10(1)(h)).