Combining Open Finance and Data Protection for Low-Income Consumers
Webinar
Open finance gives low-income consumers greater control of their personal information, helping make their data work for them, giving them access to more products at lower costs through multiple and easy-to-access channels, and allowing for remote consumer onboarding. Under open finance, with consent from the customer, banks and financial service providers (FSPs) would be required to share consumer data with other FSPs and/or third-party providers, such as fintechs. However, this unprecedented ability to move entire financial histories both empowers consumers and poses risks. For example, data users might pass on data to another party without consumers having much control over it or assurance that it will be used in their interest. Also, in the wrong hands, data could be used to commit fraud or cause other harm, undermining consumers’ trust in open finance and leading to low adoption. It is therefore important to create a legal framework that facilitates the sharing of customer data while also protecting it. In a new Technical Note, CGAP highlights the basic data protection provisions that should be in place for an open finance regime, as well as how they can be addressed through law and regulation.
In this webinar, the authors of this note offered guidance on how to address data protection concerns in an open finance world so that wary, low-income consumers in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies (EMDEs) can take advantage of what open finance has to offer. They focused particularly on how to support open finance as a means of expanding the financial inclusion of low-income consumers, while ensuring consumers’ data is kept safe and used for their benefit.
Download the presentation.
Introductory remarks by Maria Fernandez Vidal, Senior Financial Sector Specialist, CGAP.
Speakers
Ariadne Plaitakis
Ariadne Plaitakis is a Senior Program Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with a focus on regulation. A former CGAP consultant, she is currently based in London with over 20 years of extensive on-hands experience in digital finance and payments regulation, open banking, financial inclusion, privacy/data protection, e-commerce, competition law, and consumer protection in the EU and emerging markets. Her most recent projects for CGAP examined open banking/PSD2, payment interoperability, and competition in digital financial services (DFS). Ariadne is a UK-qualified solicitor with an MA in Jurisprudence from the University of Oxford and a BSc in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, and is fluent in French, German and Greek.
In addition to the publication listed below, Ariadne is also the author of the following three CGAP Background Documents: Modularization of DFS and Competition Issues, Lessons Learned from the Interchange Fees Antitrust Investigations, and Digital Data and Competition Issues.
David Medine
David Medine is a consultant to CGAP and was previously CGAP's staff lead on data protection and security. He works to develop novel, consumer-oriented approaches to data protection and to encourage the creation of cyber security resource centers for developing countries.
David has more than 25 years of experience with privacy and consumer financial services. Before joining CGAP, he served as chairman of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an attorney fellow for the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a special counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. From 2002 to 2012, he was a partner in the law firm WilmerHale. Before that, he served as a senior adviser to the White House National Economic Council. From 1992 to 2000, David was the associate director for Financial Practices at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where in addition to enforcing consumer financial laws, he took the lead on internet privacy. Before joining the FTC, he taught at the Indiana University (Bloomington) School of Law and the George Washington University School of Law.
David has a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Chicago Law School and a bachelor’s degree from Hampshire College.
Resources
Open finance gives low-income consumers greater control of their personal information, helping make their data work for them, giving them access to more products at lower costs through multiple and easy-to-access channels, and allowing for remote consumer onboarding.