Fiserv and Finicity offer more consumer choice through secure data access

By Edlyn Cardoza

Finicity, a Mastercard company, and Fiserv, Inc., both leaders in open banking technology, are advancing the future of open finance through secure data sharing. A data access agreement between the companies will allow thousands of Fiserv financial institution clients to enable consumers to provide clear and explicit permission to securely share their account information with apps that use Finicity’s open banking platform, offering more payment choices, access to an expanding range of financial services experiences, and improved overall financial literacy and wellbeing.

“The ability to share data directly and securely is a key requirement in enabling open banking and finance,” said Marc DeCastro, Research Director at IDC Financial Insights, a leading provider of global IT research and advice. “With the industry moving to standardise data access, it is important that financial institutions of all sizes are able to tokenise customer data and make it accessible to third parties. Greater connectivity will move open finance forward by facilitating the frictionless and secure financial interactions consumers want.”

Finicity will access tokenised consumer data via AllData® Connect from Fiserv, a secure portal through which consumers can consent to share their financial data with third-party apps. AllData Connect issues an identifying token in place of the consumer’s username and password. The third-party can then provide that token to the financial institution to access the consumer’s data.

With seamless integration requiring minimal technical work, banks and credit unions can utilise AllData Connect to simplify the complexities of the consumer-permissioned data market and enable next-gen financial experiences through API access. This integration will further position these banks and credit unions to support their customers’ digital banking and financial management preferences, enabling customers to share their data with the apps and services they select. Through AllData Connect, financial institutions may also gain additional insights about their customers and the third-party apps they are accessing.

“Banking relationships remain central to most peoples’ financial lives, yet they also expect to access their financial data when and where they want,” said Justin Jackson, Head of Product for Digital Payments at Fiserv. “Direct connections via APIs eliminate the need for consumers to share usernames and passwords with third parties, providing convenient and simplified access to their data in a more secure way.”

Finicity is a leader in signed data access agreements. Through this partnership with Fiserv, a major core banking solution provider, Mastercard connectivity continues to outpace competitors’ and further diminishes credential use within the ecosystem.

“This data access agreement complements Mastercard’s longstanding partnership with Fiserv, demonstrated by our aligned missions to empower consumers and organisations to permission the use of their financial data for their benefit,” said Ryan Christiansen, SVP, Data Access Partnerships at Mastercard. “The strong payments connectivity between Mastercard and Fiserv via tokenisation, traditional processing and beyond extends across infrastructure, applications and services to the secure and highly reliable API connections we’re enabling through open banking.”