Federal Budget: "Open Banking" to be studied | General financial discussion | Discussion forum

Also from page 355 in Annex 3 of this year's federal budget (see post on changes to Canadian currency regime for link):

Review of Open Banking
Financial technology (fintech) is driving change in the financial sector, and
has the potential to increase innovation and competition, providing Canadians with more affordable and useful services, and increasing financial inclusion as specific customers or markets (e.g. small and medium sized businesses) are better served.

Within this overall context, a number of international jurisdictions are implementing open banking platforms. At its core, open banking is about empowering consumers to share their financial data between their financial institution and other third party providers through secure data sharing platforms. This in turn enables financial service providers to offer more tailored products and services, on a more competitive and innovative basis. Open banking also has the potential to provide consumers with greater transparency on the products and services offered by financial institutions, thus allowing them to make more informed decisions, and makes it easier for consumers to move and manage their money.

Recognizing these potential benefits, the Government proposes to undertake a review of the merits of open banking in order to assess whether open banking would deliver positive results for Canadians with the highest regard for consumer privacy, data security and financial stability.

This could mean one of two things:

1. Support of blockchain technologies including bitcoin in our existing payments system infrastructur; or,
2. Support for third-party personal finance management tools and credit management tools (i.e., Mint.com, Mogo, bank-provided tools, etc.) that will finally permit them to operate, subject to meeting certain data security minimum standards of course, without consumers worrying about invalidating their banks' online banking security guarantees.

I tend to think it's probably both, but especially the latter. 🙂

Cheers,
Doug