CFPB Likely to Punt Data-Sharing Rule into 2023

Source: American Banker, Jan. 12

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is more than a year away from releasing a long-awaited proposal on consumers’ right to control their own financial data, far later than many had expected, according to people familiar with the bureau’s thinking.

The rule has been hotly anticipated because it would address the ability of aggregators and other fintechs to obtain consumers' bank account data through screen scraping and application programming interfaces. These firms seek broad access to help consumers manage their money, but banks and consumer advocates generally want the CFPB to narrow the scope of data collected and provide increased security, privacy and other protections.

The CFPB in the fall had listed April in the government’s unified agenda as the next date for some action to take place on its data-access rule, raising expectations about the timing of a proposal, according to several experts.

"I think people got excited when they saw the unified agenda published last November with an April 2022 date — that set some expectations for the market," said Dan Quan, co-founder and general partner at Nevcaut Ventures, an Irvine, California, venture capital firm, and a former CFPB senior advisor who headed its innovation office, Project Catalyst.

But the CFPB has continued to list data access as being in the preliminary stages with a proposal not among the bureau's priorities this year, according to the sources familiar with the bureau's thinking, who asked not to be named in this article. The main reasons for the delay are that the CFPB has other rules and priorities that must be dealt with first, some experts said. The result is that a proposal and final rule are not expected until next year.

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