Consumer Choice, Consumer Protection, and the Future of Finance

I spent nearly four years as FDIC Chairman watching open banking in the U.S. evolve in real time. Through painstaking work, financial institutions, data access platforms, and the fintechs consumers use to manage their financial lives online built trust across the ecosystem and confidence in it. That work produced something remarkable: consumers gained freedom to use their financial data with the products and services they choose. 

Consumer permission, combined with companies’ agreement to protect that data, is what has allowed digital finance to scale and why access remains open. Consumers gained the ability to securely connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use, financial institutions gained confidence that consumers’ data would be handled within a framework designed for protection, and developers gained the ability to build entirely new categories of financial products. That combination of consumer choice and consumer protection is what made open banking successful. 

Now, AI is creating the next major shift in that story.

Consumers are increasingly connecting their financial data to AI assistants, building personal financial agents, using AI to better understand their spending, planning for major life decisions, and automating parts of their financial lives. They are actively seeking out these experiences because they create real value.

As financial data increasingly flows through AI and the tools evolve, the industry faces an important question: how do we ensure that consumer protections evolve alongside consumer choice? Consumers expect their financial information to be secure, and they expect control over where it goes. Those expectations become even more important when a new technology is involved.

That is why Plaid is actively working with customers, AI providers, financial institutions, and others across the ecosystem to ensure emerging AI-powered experiences can develop in ways that expand both consumer choice and protection. 

We believe consumers should be able to use their financial data with the AI tools they choose and trust. Today, Plaid makes it possible for consumers to share their financial data with hundreds of AI-native apps and services, including OpenAI and Perplexity. As customers of Plaid, all of these companies agreed to the same data protection standards that financial institutions have required of everyone in the ecosystem. 

Every app that helps consumers manage their money, every service that builds on open banking, every tool that uses consumer financial data to deliver value depends on trust in the ecosystem. That trust is built on strong security practices, safeguards, and industry standards that help protect consumers if something goes wrong. When consumer financial data flows outside of these frameworks, those consumer protections must travel with it. 

Through industry cooperation and collaboration, consumers gained access and control over their financial data with more freedom than ever before. We built that together with financial institutions of all sizes, with customers, and with advocates for consumer data rights. As AI reshapes the landscape, protecting that progress is work worth doing – and it is how we ensure the next generation of financial innovation is both more powerful and more trustworthy.