Data sharing

Meredith Fuchs, formerly the top lawyer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, says data aggregators like Plaid "have matured." She will help the company prepare for new data-sharing rules and its pending sale to Visa.

For the past several years, the concept of sharing transaction data between merchants, processors and issuers has been considered a good security measure to curb fraud. But someone has to compile and compare that data in such a way to not only stop fraud, but assure legitimate transactions are not declined.

Thanks to their close relationship with the card networks, banks stand to benefit most from deals like Mastercard’s agreement to buy Finicity and Visa’s pending purchase of Plaid. The prospects for fintechs and consumers are dicier.

The agency's recent update to its guidelines for banks on working with data aggregators and other third parties was not extreme, but some critics say its heavy emphasis on security could be a setback for open banking.

The U.S. banking system risks being left behind by the European Union and the United Kingdom when it comes to open banking.

Moving to an open banking system comes with both costs and benefits that each bank will need to weigh before diving in.

JPMorgan Chase plans to block fintechs from screen scraping — obtaining usernames and passwords of customers, logging in as them, and copying and pasting their account information into a database.

Open banking transactions are not initiated by a consumer but are coming from another financial services company. This could make some fraud detection models in place today obsolete.

The deal between one of the largest U.S. banks and a dominant data aggregator is designed to give customers more control over their data.

The company offers an operating system for financial applications akin to Apple's iOS, and more than 1,000 applications run on it.