Open banking goes back to drafting
The rule was finished, enjoined and reopened. The compliance date arrived and bound nobody, and the fee question is live again.
Tran Mau Tri Tam via UnsplashConsumer data portability in American banking has a finished rule, a compliance date that has passed, and no enforcement. That combination is unusual enough to be worth explaining carefully, because a great deal of product planning was built on it.
The rule requires covered institutions to make a consumer's account data available, in electronic form, to the consumer and to third parties they authorise. It is the legal foundation for account aggregation, which most personal finance and lending products quietly depend on.
It is also not in force. Counsel tracking the matter describe the rule enjoined and under reconsideration by the agency that wrote it, with the first compliance date arriving without becoming an enforcement trigger.
A replacement proposal has since moved into interagency review, which means the shape of the obligation is being decided again rather than refined.
The reopened question that matters commercially is whether a bank may charge for access. Under the original rule it could not, which is what made aggregation economically viable for everyone downstream of it.
Reverse that and the industry changes shape. A per-call fee turns a free input into a cost of goods sold for every aggregator and every application built on one, and the products least able to absorb it serve customers with the least money.
Banks have a real argument that is usually stated poorly. Building and maintaining a secure, high-availability interface is expensive, and being compelled to provide it at no charge to firms that compete with you is a genuine asymmetry.
The counterargument is that the data is the customer's rather than the bank's, and that a fee for access to your own records is a toll on portability, which is precisely what the statute was meant to prevent.
While this is unresolved, states have begun legislating, which produces the outcome nobody wanted: a national market with regional data rules and a compliance surface that varies by where the customer lives.
For anyone building on account data, the practical posture is defensive. Assume access continues, assume it may acquire a price, and avoid designing a product whose unit economics only work while an input is free and a rule is unsettled.