Open Banking goes to Washington: Lessons from the EU on regulatory-driven data sharing regimes

After representing the main country embracing a market-led approach to Open Banking, the U.S. is on the verge of switching to a regulatory-driven regime by mandating the sharing of financial data. Relying on the Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has, indeed, recently proposed a rulemaking on “Personal Financial Data Rights.” As the U.S. is, therefore, apparently following the EU, which has been at the forefront of the government-led Open Banking movement, the paper aims at analyzing the CFPB’s proposal by taking stock of the EU experience. The review of the EU regulatory framework and its UK implementation provides useful insights about the functioning and challenging trade-offs of Open Banking, thus ultimately enabling us to assess whether the CFPB’s proposal would provide significant added value for innovation and competition or would rather represent an unnecessary regulatory burden.