, serve the financial services industry itself by assisting in porting and aggregating client data from various providers.
But screen scraping is not an ideal solution, says Eric Arnold, CEO of Planswell, a Toronto-based fintech firm that provides free financial plans online to Canadians. Although he says he has never heard of these rules being enforced, financial services institutions have them “in their back pocket” if client information is stolen.Indeed, large financial services institutions have cause for concern. Canada’s major financial services institutions have “traditionally been the gatekeepers for a lot of sensitive information,” Mr. Russell says.
Yet, technological challenges are not the biggest obstacle to embracing open banking, Mr. Felesky says. “We believe the top Canadian banks are in a position to turn on an API infrastructure fairly easily.” What’s more, he adds that “Canada needs open data systems to better capitalize on next-generation client services” that involve automation, machine learning and data analytics.