Five things we learned from Tearsheet’s second DataDay Conference
- The financial services industry – including banks, fintechs and aggregators – are focusing on ways to allow for secure, consumer-permissioned data access.
- The industry in the U.S. is moving towards adoption of a standardized way to safely transfer account data as new use cases emerge.

A year into the coronavirus crisis, adoption of digital financial services has accelerated considerably.
At the center of new ways to deliver financial services is the use of customer data. Embedded finance and embedded fintech are unlocking new possibilities for consumers to manage their money and access credit. At the same time, banking-as-a-service providers are making it easy for non-financial brands to add banking and payments capabilities.
“When you have [application programming interfaces] you can actually start to reimagine financial services, pull the pieces apart, and you’re going to start to reconfigure them in ways that service niche markets,” said Dan Kahn, open finance lead at Plaid.
Industry practitioners understand that access to additional data can unlock new product innovations and enhance access. Indeed, how consumer financial data is shared, and the extent to which consumers have opted in, has been the source of considerable debate in recent years. The industry is moving away from credential sharing in favor of API-based data-transfer standards that allow for security, rights and permissions. But the process of getting to this end state will take time.
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