This week in data – 12th April

Wells Fargo, one of the USA’s largest banking and financial institutions have inked a data sharing deal with real-time financial data aggregator, Finicity. The deal will see APIs feed Wells Fargo customer information into financial apps and services which Finicity supports, effectively cutting out the requirement for users to provide credentials to potentially unsecured third-party apps.

Head of Digital for Wells Fargo Virtual Channels, Brett Pitts said; “Establishing a data-sharing process with a provider like Finicity creates a much better experience for our customers. This allows our customers to choose where and how to use their financial data, while also maintaining the privacy of their user credentials.”

Speaking of consumer access to their financial data…

Following a speech from Australian Treasurer, Scott Morrison, at the recent AFR Banking & Wealth Summit, there is speculation that the government in preparing to ask the Productivity Commission to conduct a formal review of competition in the banking sector.

It is likely that this review will focus heavily on data portability and its impact on competition with Morrison stating; “The Productivity Commission can now move onto a new task – with that [data] report completed – to implement the Murray inquiry’s recommendations to review competition in the banking and financial sector,”

In other news…

The European Commission have announced that they are committing €7.1 million over the next three years to fund data-driven innovation via a new start-up accelerator, Data Pitch.  This is massive news for start-ups across the EU who will be able to access funding, mentoring and access to data from established businesses and the public sector — with each program running for six months.

“The ambition is to create an innovation ecosystem for Europe, where larger organizations work closely with agile startups to innovate and learn from each other, using data as an enabler to solve problems,” the EC said in a statement.

We just adore this idea and commitment for data innovation!

WORTH A READ

  • Unclear about what the recent FCC internet privacy ruling in the US actually means? This piece from The Verge provides a good summary.
  • The AIB have released a new 2017 handbook on Mobile Location Data and how businesses can effectively and ethically use location data for real-time marketing personalization.

Until next week.

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