Open Finance Turns Consent Into a Competitive Asset
Open finance makes consumer consent economically valuable. The firms that win will make permission specific, useful, and reversible.
Why this matters
There is a moment in a financial app where the product quietly asks for more of you.
Connect another account. Share transaction history. Let us access your lending data. Let us use your information to make this journey faster.
The permission screen might be tidy. The legal text might be correct. But the person reading it is usually asking a much simpler question:
What do I get back?
Open finance makes that question more important. The old version of consent was often treated as a hurdle. Get the tick, move the user through the flow, let the lawyers sleep. The newer version is different because permissioned financial data is becoming commercially useful across advice, lending, mortgages, insurance, pensions, and personal finance tools.
That turns consent into a competitive asset.
Not because firms can collect more of it, but because the best firms will earn it more clearly.
Worked example
Mastercard’s 2026 State of Open Finance report says 76% of consumers surveyed are ready to switch financial providers for better digital money-management features, and 82% would share data to simplify loan and mortgage journeys. Those figures should make product teams pay attention, but they should not be read as a blank cheque.
People are not saying, “Please take all my financial data and do something vague with it.”
They are saying, “If there is a clear benefit, I may let you use more context.”
That difference matters.
In Europe, the Financial Data Access framework, FiDA, points in the same direction at a regulatory level: broader access to financial data beyond the original open banking frame. Eurofi’s open finance coverage notes that the framework remains under negotiation, with political agreement targeted in 2026. The details may shift, but the product question is already here.
What does good consent look like when financial data has real economic value?
| Weak consent | Useful consent |
|---|---|
| ”Allow access to improve your experience" | "Share mortgage and income data to pre-fill this application” |
| Broad, sticky, hard to inspect | Specific, reviewable, revocable |
| Benefit belongs mostly to the provider | Benefit is visible to the person |
| Consent is treated as compliance | Consent is treated as a product promise |
The last row is the important one.
Consent is not just a legal state. It is a relationship state. A user gives a product a temporary piece of trust and waits to see whether that trust was well placed.
Permission should feel less like handing over a spare key and more like lending someone the right tool for a specific job.
That metaphor is useful because it keeps the boundary small. A tool has a purpose. It can be returned. It does not give the borrower the run of the house.
Limitations / not a fit
Open finance will not become trustworthy by putting nicer words on permission screens. If the underlying product still extracts more than it returns, users will feel the shape of that bargain eventually.
There is also a risk that “consent” becomes a way to shift responsibility onto the user. The person clicked yes, therefore everything that follows is treated as fair. That is too thin, especially with financial data. Most people are not evaluating downstream inference, retention, model training, third-party sharing, or how difficult revocation will be later.
So the product standard needs to be higher than “we asked”.
Good consent should be:
- specific enough to understand
- useful enough to justify
- narrow enough to trust
- visible enough to inspect
- reversible enough to feel real
The firms that take this seriously will have an advantage because they will not have to beg for data. Their products will make the return obvious.
That is the better open finance story. Consent becomes valuable because the person can see why sharing helps them, not because the industry found a more efficient way to ask.
Sources
- Mastercard: The State of Open Finance 2026
- Council of the EU: Financial Data Access framework
- Eurofi: Open Finance and FiDA