Open Banking Needs a Report Card, Not Just a Rulebook 

From: Harvey Naglie  

To: Open banking watchers  

Date: August 13, 2026  

Re: Open Banking Needs a Report Card, Not Just a Rulebook 

A year ago, I argued that Canada can’t afford to wait for open banking. After years of studies and consultations, the problem was no longer deciding what to do. It was getting on with it. 

Ottawa finally has. The Consumer-Driven Banking Act received royal assent in March. Proposed regulations followed on June 27. The Bank of Canada will supervise the framework. Large banks will have to participate, qualified providers can join, consumers will be able to share at least 24 months of account data without charge, and the system is intended eventually to replace screen scraping. 

That is progress. But the issue has changed. 

Canada no longer needs another argument about whether to build open banking. It needs to make sure the system works once it is built. 

That starts with transparency. The proposed rules require participating institutions to keep their data-sharing systems available at least 99.5 percent of the time. Banks cannot use rate limits or throttling to discriminate against competitors or degrade consumer outcomes. Response times, by contrast, must simply meet generally accepted international standards – a benchmark the rules do not name, quantify or attribute to any standard-setter. 

A soft standard would matter less if the numbers were public. They largely will not be. Much of the performance information goes to the Bank, not necessarily to anyone else. 

A connection can be technically available and still work badly. It can be slow, unreliable or cumbersome enough that customers blame the fintech and go back to their bank. Without public data on response times, failed calls, successful connections and outages, consumers and competitors will have no way to distinguish a well-functioning system from one that merely satisfies the rulebook. 

The United Kingdom publishes this information by banking brand.. Canada should do the same. Institution-by-institution performance reporting should be mandatory and frequent enough to expose problems while they still matter. 

Redress is another weak point. The legislation sensibly provides that consumers generally should not bear qualifying losses caused by unauthorized access to or use of their data. But responsibility can be split between the institution sending the data and the company receiving it. 

That may work between firms. It is much less satisfactory for the consumer. 

If money is lost, the customer cannot see what happened inside either company's systems and should not have to wait while the two determine fault. The consumer should be made whole promptly. The firms can sort out liability afterwards. 

The complaints process is also less robust than it appears. The external complaints body can take up to 120 days after receiving the information it requires, and its final decision is not binding. It is a recommendation. A firm that refuses to comply can eventually be named. 

Naming and shaming has value. It is not redress. 

There is also a governance problem. 

The Bank of Canada has created a Consumer-Driven Banking Advisory Committee to provide industry perspective and advice. Its members come from banks, fintechs, payment companies and other industry participants. 

There is no equivalent institutionalized consumer voice. 

That omission matters because the design details still to be settled – consent screens, authentication, error messages, reconnection procedures, data standards – will be written as technical specifications and lived as consumer experience. They decide whether people understand what they are authorizing and whether the system is usable. 

The Bank has deep payments and financial-system expertise. Consumer-driven banking gives it a materially new consumer-facing role. It should establish a permanent consumer advisory mechanism alongside the industry’s. 

Ottawa should also be more cautious about its benefits forecast. 

The regulatory analysis estimates $13.2 billion in benefits over 10 years, assuming nine million Canadians – 27 percent of those aged 15 and older – adopt consumer-driven banking “at the outset.” Britain took years to build mass adoption after launching open banking in 2018. 

Ottawa is forecasting on day one what took the United Kingdom most of a decade. Since adoption drives most of the benefit, it should publish sensitivity analyses at 10-, 15- and 20-percent uptake. 

None of this argues for delay. 

Canada has already taken long enough. The framework contains much that is sound: Common standards, mandatory participation by the largest banks and meaningful security obligations. 

But rules alone will not create competition. 

A year ago, the challenge was getting Canada to start building. Now the challenge is making performance visible, redress effective and consumers part of the governance. 

Open banking can give Canadians more control over their financial data and more choice in financial services. But if Ottawa wants the promised benefits to be more than projections in a regulatory impact statement, it needs to measure what happens after launch – and let everyone see the results. 

Harvey Naglie is a financial services policy analyst and a former senior policy advisor with the Ontario Ministry of Finance.  

To send a comment or leave feedback, email us at blog@cdhowe.org.   

The views expressed here are those of the author. The C.D. Howe Institute does not take corporate positions on policy matters.