Future-proof your open finance strategy

Consumer Bankers Association: The Consumer Bankers Association is pleased to welcome you to today's webinar, Empowering Consumers Everywhere, Future-Proof, your Open Finance Strategy presented by Akoya.  

It's now my pleasure to introduce our speakers, Paul LaRusso, CEO of Akoya, Olga Hoff, EVP, director of Enterprise Retail Banking at Zions. And Thea Mason, vice President, consumer Banking at PenFed, and facilitating today's discussion is Courtney Robinson head of policy and communications for Akoya. Paul, Olga, and Thea, welcome. And now I will turn it over to you, Courtney. 

Courtney Robinson: Thanks Isabella. And thank you all for joining us in today's discussion. Isabella said, my name is Courtney Robinson and I'm the head of Policy and communications here at Akoya. I'll be facilitating today's conversation. 

We're going to talk about something that impacts all of us. How consumers access and share their financial data for years. Only a select few institutions offer their customers transparency and control, but that's no longer good enough. Consumers expect and deserve visibility into what data they're sharing and with whom across the entire financial ecosystem. 

Today we'll explore how financial institutions can meet those expectations, reduce screen scraping and create real business value through modern secure API based data access. All right, panelists, are you ready? We can jump right in. Okay. Let's start with the why. Consumers have increasingly embraced fintechs to manage their finances. 

Olga, from your perspective at Zion's, how have consumer expectations around digital experiences changed in the last few years, and what kind of feedback are you hearing from your customers when it comes to data access and control? 

Olga Hoff: That's an excellent questions Courtney and thank you for having me and certainly happy to provide a perspective. 

As I think about what's really shaping consumer expectations. Many factors are coming outside the financial services industry. They're coming out of experiences consumers are having with retailers with airlines. Those expectations are evolving in an ecosystem that's. 

Separate and distinct from financial service services, but the expectations are absolutely spilling over into how banking and financial services need needs to interact with customers. Obviously, there are generational shifts in playing a role. Consumer comfort with sharing all sorts of data with the world is evolving, right? 

And apparently banking credentials are no exception. And so, this culture of digital oversharing that, that really started in social media, is absolutely evident right now in how consumer consumers deal with their financial lives. In fact, I would say that younger consumers are probably spending more time curating their social media profiles than applying similarly diligent hygiene practices to how they're managing their financial lives and their credentials. 

I think expectations around channel availability obviously are evolving. What, what used to be acceptable in terms of downtime outages? Just a few years ago, it was channels. Such as open banking is no longer acceptable. 

Anybody who has done a conversion, anybody who works in a financial institution, who has done a conversion where a third party or an aggregator just was a little bit behind the power curve in terms of updating their script. Knows that when things break, co consumers call the bank because clearly, it's the bank's fault that their third-party application has is, has broken down. 

So, the expectations around kind of resiliency, reliability, and just this smooth, uninterrupted experience just continue to get elevated. I will say YY I'll contrast to all these changing expectations. What hasn't changed, what hasn't changed is the trust that consumers place in, in their banks. 

So, there's this expectation that my, my bank has my back. We continue to reinforce these expectations through policies such as zero liability that exist in, exist in the card system. I, I think, the nuances of that are. Appreciated by industry players. They're not appreciated by the broad consumers. 

So, there is absolutely an expectation that, if there's an authorized debit card transaction, the bank will just take care of it. And unfortunately, that spills over into any transaction and any kind of a. Kind of an experience. So, this trust that we that we developed with consumers and it's the foundation of our relationships that has not changed and we need to continue to invest and support that. 

That's maybe how I'd kick that off. 

Courtney Robinson: Yes, no, Olga, I think that's such a great call out the way that consumer expectations rest with their financial institution, with their bank or their credit union no matter how they're handling their financial lives. So, I think that's a perfect segue to Thea. 

Thea as more members engage with fintechs, how are you thinking about protecting their data, especially in terms of preventing breaches and ensuring secure access and control, and what does that signal about their expectations around safety, transparency, and trust. 

Thea Mason: That's a great question, Courtney and thanks for having me participate in this. 

So, I think in some ways old, what old is experiencing at Zions is very similar to what Pen Fit is experiencing. Ours, we're a credit union, so our mission has always been centered around empowering our members. Through trust, transparency, and service. But what we're seeing today is that our members want full control over their data to enable their digital life. 

They're using budgeting apps, they're using investment platforms, digital wallets, and they really expect seamless access and transparency from their primary financial institution. At the same time, they view us as stewards of their financial data, and they look to us to keep their data secure and safe. 

And that's happening in an environment were. Consumers are, have an increased frequency of fraudsters attempting to gain access to their data and to their accounts. So, it's important for us at PenFed to ensure we have a platform and capability that keeps our member data secure but still enabling their financial lives. 

Because of that two years ago, we started this journey. And we've already partnered with Akoya to invest in secure API based data access, and we have discontinued screen scraping. We just found that it was, the screen scraping was. Exposing our members to a risk that they, we do not perceive them to want to take on. 

So, at this point, we're fully running on the Akoya platform, seeing the reporting, and increased usage by our members of data sharing and this capability every day. 

Courtney Robinson: Awesome, Paul. Moving on to you and looking at the industry more broadly, how's the rise in FinTech adoption? 

And by default, screen scraping, like Thea mentioned, accelerated the need for data transparency. And why do you believe it's so critical that all institutions. Not just a few. Begin offering modern data sharing experiences to consumers. 

Paul LaRusso: Yes. Thanks Courtney. When you think about, for your first question around the adoption and how much of this has been driven by consumer demand just back in 2018. 

There were roughly a little under 6,000 FinTech apps. And fast forward to where we are now, it's over 12,000 FinTech apps in the us. So, it has more than doubled, just over the past seven or so years. So, you see the breadth and the expansion of the apps that consumers want, and consumers want to use to help manage finances. 

But then it's also the expansion of the use cases. Now we're seeing use cases where consumers want to pay with their bank account and do more payments on account-to-account transfers. You're seeing the rise of funding accounts for digital currency and cryptocurrency. Stable coin funding wallets. 

All of this is growing. Then you're also seeing alternative means of underwriting and help complimenting what traditional bureau data lacked around deposit-based cash flow and data there. So, you're seeing the size and scale of the FinTech applications significantly grow. 

And then you're seeing this expansion of the use cases where customers want to use more. And that's great. It's a good thing for consumers, for them to have more choice and more options to have more control over their financial life. With that brings a lot of risk. And you think about these very large pools of data. 

That are now being proliferated out into the ecosystem. And that creates a lot of risk not just for the consumer but also for the participants and for the financial institutions who I think Olga made a great point earlier. And something went wrong. The consumer will typically call or contact the financial institution to help figure things out. 

So, I think that kind of puts us in a space, okay, how are institutions soon? And I think Thea brought up these great themes. I think about the first theme around giving the consumer more visibility and control. Around what's happening. And that's what a more secure channel, more secure open banking provides for the consumer being able to see which applications are taking what data, how often and when, and putting the consumer in control of what, how that happens and how that occurs. 

The second thing which Thea touched on is the security aspect. Moving to APIs and secure APIs closing the back door on screen scraping you really start to protect not only the customer, the consumer, but also the financial institution, systems and infrastructure. 

And you start to mitigate a significant amount of risk that's been out there. For the fi. And then the last piece is around data privacy. And when you move to a token-based model where you're only allowing the data needed for the consumer use case, you're starting to enforce practices around data minimization. 

And only providing the data of what the consumer needs to fulfill that particular use case or that task. So, I think, think about the large amounts of expansion of apps. That's great. The use cases, that's also great for consumers, but NGA have the risks of these large amounts of data sitting out there. 

And for financial institutions thinking about it, thinking about the control for the consumer the security, and then the data privacy. 

Courtney Robinson: Yes. Thank you, Paul. So now that we've talked to all our participants and covered the why, let's shift to the business case. Many see open finance as a compliance or infrastructure issue. 

Financial institutions should be looking at it as a strategic growth opportunity. So, Paul, how do you think institutions can start to reframe open finance from something that they have to do to something that can unlock actual long-term value? And what are some of the tangible ways banks can begin realizing that value today? 

Paul LaRusso: Yes, it's a, it is a great question. I've seen I've worked with a lot of financial institutions in different evolutions of this as they're thinking about it. But I think one thing that I see a theme that is where financial students are very successful in this is when they start with what the problem is that they want to solve. 

What is that strategy or what's the kind of focus area for them? Once that is established and aligned internally within the organ organization, it makes the ability to execute, to partner, to implement, to manage, to track, and to measure a lot easier. And typically, what I'll see is putting aside the, I've seen more in financial institutions now focusing on the value. 

And what it delivers. And there is a big amount of focus on the co, the consumer and how they're providing more value and benefit to the consumer. And it comes in a couple of different ways. One is control, ensuring that the consumer is taking control of their finances and their data. And the second is the visibility. 

And the engagement with the financial institution. So, as financial institutions start to build permission dashboards and visibility tools and start to show their consumers who they're interacting with, what type of data sets and how they're now building an engagement. Portal or a dashboard, but they're increasing the engagement and touch points that they'll have directly with their consumer. 

And I think Thea said it earlier, but this concept is around trust, like you start to build more trust with your consumers. By being that trusted hub of not only where you might have your credit or your debit card or your bank account making payments, but also where all your financial data is flowing. 

So, the consumer starts to engage more with the financial institution and builds more trust in that relationship. Where I we're to the point where you really feel like your financial institution is there looking out for you and making sure that not only your money, but also your data. 

It is protected and you have control over who gets what and when. So, I think that's one of the big values that we see FIS moving towards. 

Courtney Robinson: Great. Got it. Thea, Paul touched on this a bit, but what role does consumer trust play when it comes to open finance at PenFed? And how do you think creating more transparent data sharing experiences can help deepen the member relationships and loyalty that you all have? 

Thea Mason: Courtney, as part of our implementation and, we've stood up in our digital banking experience a security pro kind of portal where our members can do a lot of things set up additional MFA authentication or other ways of accessing their digital accounts that are more secure. 

And as part of that overall portal, we include information on their data sharing and enable them to easily permission or discontinue data access. So, they can see who they're giving their data to, what kind of data they're giving and permission or not permissioning that data. 

And what we're seeing is that that clarity does two things. It inspires in our members' confidence that we're really looking out. For them and keeping their data and their accounts secure it gives them clarity over what's really happening with their data. And what we're finding is that it creates an overall confidence that our members have in us. 

And that is fueling loyalty because I think they see us as protecting their data and facilitating their financial needs. And it's causing them to stick around and explore more of what PenFed has to offer. 

Courtney Robinson: Got it. Olga, from your end, how is Zions thinking about open finance as a differentiator in today's competitive banking environment? 

And what effects do you think it'll have on customer engagement in new products and services? 

Olga Hoff: In, in terms of just adding to the conversation on maybe approaching it through a slightly different angle I think both Paul and the have really highlighted the trust elements of this and how you can differentiate by, by, through transparency and so on. 

Another way to look at it is. Is look at this evolving ecosystem, not just as a data provider, but also a data consumer. And even in the data provider space, visibility into the ecosystem of third parties that the consumers are sharing data. Gives you the ability to leverage those insights and potentially present relevant offers and really differentiates through relevance. 

Now, as a data consumer playing on the other side of this ecosystem, Paul alluded to this, there are interesting use cases in the credit space. So alternative data scoring income verification and, so that, that allow you to really expand your lending offerings to consumers and think about those lending offerings different, differently use cases like direct deposit switching and account funding leveraging partners or again, leveraging sort of the data in, not the data out construct. 

Are very compelling in terms of smoothing out the onboarding experiences. And finally, what we're seeing is emerging value propositions that frankly have little to do with the enhancement of existing products. We see partners developing solutions such as subscription management that is a, not a thing that, that. 

Traditionally banks and credit unions are doing this but certainly it is a meaningful enhancement to and to people's financial lives. And, and very much aligned with, was making your clients stronger and putting them in control of their finances. So, I think there's a lot of opportunity, not. 

As a data provider, but also as a data consumer, that, that, that are worth exploring and that fundamentally rely on this ecosystem existing. It is in the industry. So 

Consumer Bankers Association: The Consumer Bankers Association is pleased to welcome you to today's webinar, Empowering Consumers Everywhere, Future-Proof, your Open Finance Strategy presented by Akoya.  

It's now my pleasure to introduce our speakers, Paul LaRusso, CEO of Akoya, Olga Hoff, EVP, director of Enterprise Retail Banking at Zions. And Thea Mason, vice President, consumer Banking at PenFed, and facilitating today's discussion is Courtney Robinson head of policy and communications for Akoya. Paul, Olga, and Thea, welcome. And now I will turn it over to you, Courtney. 

Courtney Robinson: Thanks Isabella. And thank you all for joining us in today's discussion. Isabella said, my name is Courtney Robinson and I'm the head of Policy and communications here at Akoya. I'll be facilitating today's conversation. 

We're going to talk about something that impacts all of us. How consumers access and share their financial data for years. Only a select few institutions offer their customers transparency and control, but that's no longer good enough. Consumers expect and deserve visibility into what data they're sharing and with whom across the entire financial ecosystem. 

Today we'll explore how financial institutions can meet those expectations, reduce screen scraping and create real business value through modern secure API based data access. All right, panelists, are you ready? We can jump right in. Okay. Let's start with the why. Consumers have increasingly embraced fintechs to manage their finances. 

Olga, from your perspective at Zion's, how have consumer expectations around digital experiences changed in the last few years, and what kind of feedback are you hearing from your customers when it comes to data access and control? 

Olga Hoff: That's an excellent question, Courtney, and thank you for having me and certainly happy to provide a perspective. 

As I think about what's really shaping consumer expectations. Many factors are coming outside the financial services industry. They're coming out of experiences consumers are having with retailers with airlines. Those expectations are evolving in an ecosystem that's. 

Separate and distinct from financial service services, but the expectations are absolutely spilling over into how banking and financial services need needs to interact with customers. Obviously, there are generational shifts in playing a role. Consumer comfort with sharing all sorts of data with the world is evolving, right? 

And apparently banking credentials are no exception. And so, this culture of digital oversharing that, that really started in social media, is absolutely evident right now in how consumer consumers deal with their financial lives. In fact, I would say that younger consumers are probably spending more time curating their social media profiles than applying similarly diligent hygiene practices to how they're managing their financial lives and their credentials. 

I think expectations around channel availability obviously are evolving. What, what used to be acceptable in terms of downtime outages? Just a few years ago, it was channels. Such as open banking is no longer acceptable. 

Anybody who has done a conversion, anybody who works in a financial institution, who has done a conversion where a third party or an aggregator just was a little bit behind the power curve in terms of updating their script. Knows that when things break, co consumers call the bank because clearly, it's the bank's fault that their third-party application has is, has broken down. 

So, the expectations around kind of resiliency, reliability, and just this smooth, uninterrupted experience just continue to get elevated. I will say YY I'll contrast to all these changing expectations. What hasn't changed, what hasn't changed is the trust that consumers place in, in their banks. 

So, there's this expectation that my, my bank has my back. We continue to reinforce these expectations through policies such as zero liability that exist in, exist in the card system. I, I think, the nuances of that are. Appreciated by industry players. They're not appreciated by the broad consumers. 

So, there is absolutely an expectation that, if there's an authorized debit card transaction, the bank will just take care of it. And unfortunately, that spills over into any transaction and any kind of a. Kind of an experience. So, this trust that we that we developed with consumers and it's the foundation of our relationships that has not changed and we need to continue to invest and support that. 

That's maybe how I'd kick that off. 

Courtney Robinson: Yes, no, Olga, I think that's such a great call out the way that consumer expectations rest with their financial institution, with their bank or their credit union no matter how they're handling their financial lives. So, I think that's a perfect segue to Thea. 

Thea is more members in. Gauge with fintechs, how are you thinking about protecting their data, especially in terms of preventing breaches and ensuring secure access and control, and what does that signal about their expectations around safety, transparency, and trust. 

Thea Mason: That's a great question, Courtney and thanks for having me participate in this. 

So, I think in some ways old, what old is experiencing at Zions is very similar to what Pen Fit is experiencing. Ours, we're a credit union, so our mission has always been centered around empowering our members. Through trust, transparency, and service. But what we're seeing today is that our members want full control over their data to enable their digital life. 

They're using budgeting apps, they're using investment platforms, digital wallets, and they really expect seamless access and transparency from their primary financial institution. At the same time, they view us as stewards of their financial data, and they look to us to keep their data secure and safe. 

And that's happening in an environment were. Consumers are, have an increased frequency of fraudsters attempting to gain access to their data and to their accounts. So, it's important for us at PenFed to ensure we have a platform and capability that keeps our member data secure but still enabling their financial lives. 

Because of that two years ago, we started this journey. And we've already partnered with Akoya to invest in secure API based data access, and we have discontinued screen scraping. We just found that it was, the screen scraping was. Exposing our members to a risk that they, we do not perceive them to want to take on. 

So, at this point, we're fully running on the Akoya platform, seeing the reporting, and increased usage by our members of data sharing and this capability every day. 

Courtney Robinson: Awesome, Paul. Moving on to you and looking at the industry more broadly, how's the rise in FinTech adoption? 

And by default, screen scraping, like Thea mentioned, accelerated the need for data transparency. And why do you believe it's so critical that all institutions. Not just a few. Begin offering modern data sharing experiences to consumers. 

Paul LaRusso: Yes. Thanks Courtney. When you think about, for your first question around the adoption and how much of this has been driven by consumer demand just back in 2018. 

There were roughly a little under 6,000 FinTech apps. And fast forward to where we are now, it's over 12,000 FinTech apps in the us. So, it has more than doubled, just over the past seven or so years. So, you see the breadth and the expansion of the apps that consumers want, and consumers want to use to help manage finances. 

But then it's also the expansion of the use cases. Now we're seeing use cases where consumers want to pay with their bank account and do more payments on account-to-account transfers. You're seeing the rise of funding accounts for digital currency and cryptocurrency. Stable coin funding wallets. 

All of this is growing. Then you're also seeing alternative means of underwriting and help complimenting what traditional bureau data lacked around deposit-based cash flow and data there. So, you're seeing the size and scale of the FinTech applications significantly grow. 

And then you're seeing this expansion of the use cases where customers want to use more. And that's great. It's a good thing for consumers, for them to have more choice and more options to have more control over their financial life. With that brings a lot of risk. And you think about these very large pools of data. 

That are now being proliferated out into the ecosystem. And that creates a lot of risk not just for the consumer but also for the participants and for the financial institutions who I think Olga made a great point earlier. And something went wrong. The consumer will typically call or contact the financial institution to help figure things out. 

So, I think that kind of puts us in a space, okay, how are institutions soon? And I think Thea brought up these great themes. I think about the first theme around giving the consumer more visibility and control. Around what's happening. And that's what a more secure channel, more secure open banking provides for the consumer being able to see which applications are taking what data, how often and when, and putting the consumer in control of what, how that happens and how that occurs. 

The second thing which Thea touched on is the security aspect. Moving to APIs and secure APIs closing the back door on screen scraping you really start to protect not only the customer, the consumer, but also the financial institution, systems and infrastructure. 

And you start to mitigate a significant amount of risk that's been out there. For the fi. And then the last piece is around data privacy. And when you move to a token-based model where you're only allowing the data needed for the consumer use case, you're starting to enforce practices around data minimization. 

And only providing the data of what the consumer needs to fulfill that particular use case or that task. So, I think, think about the large amounts of expansion of apps. That's great. The use cases, that's also great for consumers, but NGA have the risks of these large amounts of data sitting out there. 

And for financial institutions thinking about it, thinking about the control for the consumer the security, and then the data privacy. 

Courtney Robinson: Yes. Thank you, Paul. So now that we've talked to all our participants and covered the why, let's shift to the business case. Many see open finance as a compliance or infrastructure issue. 

Financial institutions should be looking at it as a strategic growth opportunity. So, Paul, how do you think institutions can start to reframe open finance from something that they have to do to something that can unlock actual long-term value? And what are some of the tangible ways banks can begin realizing that value today? 

Paul LaRusso: Yes, it's a, it is a great question. I've seen I've worked with a lot of financial institutions in different evolutions of this as they're thinking about it. But I think one thing that I see a theme that is where financial students are very successful in this is when they start with what the problem is that they want to solve. 

What is that strategy or what's the kind of focus area for them? Once that is established and aligned internally within the organ organization, it makes the ability to execute, to partner, to implement, to manage, to track, and to measure a lot easier. And typically, what I'll see is putting aside the, I've seen more in financial institutions now focusing on the value. 

And what it delivers. And there is a big amount of focus on the co, the consumer and how they're providing more value and benefit to the consumer. And it comes in a couple of different ways. One is control, ensuring that the consumer is taking control of their finances and their data. And the second is the visibility. 

And the engagement with the financial institution. So, as financial institutions start to build permission dashboards and visibility tools and start to show their consumers who they're interacting with, what type of data sets and how they're now building an engagement. Portal or a dashboard, but they're increasing the engagement and touch points that they'll have directly with their consumer. 

And I think Thea said it earlier, but this concept is around trust, like you start to build more trust with your consumers. By being that trusted hub of not only where you might have your credit or your debit card or your bank account making payments, but also where all your financial data is flowing. 

So, the consumer starts to engage more with the financial institution and builds more trust in that relationship. Where I we're to the point where you really feel like your financial institution is there looking out for you and making sure that not only your money, but also your data. 

It is protected and you have control over who gets what and when. So, I think that's one of the big values that we see FIS moving towards. 

Courtney Robinson: Great. Got it. Thea, Paul touched on this a bit, but what role does consumer trust play when it comes to open finance at PenFed? And how do you think creating more transparent data sharing experiences can help deepen the member relationships and loyalty that you all have? 

Thea Mason: Courtney, as part of our implementation and, we've stood up in our digital banking experience a security pro kind of portal where our members can do a lot of things set up additional MFA authentication or other ways of accessing their digital accounts that are more secure. 

And as part of that overall portal, we include information on their data sharing and enable them to easily permission or discontinue data access. So, they can see who they're giving their data to, what kind of data they're giving and permission or not permissioning that data. 

And what we're seeing is that that clarity does two things. It inspires in our members' confidence that we're really looking out. For them and keeping their data and their accounts secure it gives them clarity over what's really happening with their data. And what we're finding is that it creates an overall confidence that our members have in us. 

And that is fueling loyalty because I think they see us as protecting their data and facilitating their financial needs. And it's causing them to stick around and explore more of what PenFed has to offer. 

Courtney Robinson: Got it. Olga, from your end, how is Zions thinking about open finance as a differentiator in today's competitive banking environment? 

And what effects do you think it'll have on customer engagement in new products and services? 

Olga Hoff: In terms of just adding to the conversation on maybe approaching it through a slightly different angle I think both Paul and the have really highlighted the trust elements of this and how you can differentiate by, by, through transparency and so on. 

Another way to look at it is. Is look at this evolving ecosystem, not just as a data provider, but also a data consumer. And even in the data provider space, visibility into the ecosystem of third parties that the consumers are sharing data. Gives you the ability to leverage those insights and potentially present relevant offers and really differentiates through relevance. 

Now, as a data consumer playing on the other side of this ecosystem, Paul alluded to this, there are interesting use cases in the credit space. So alternative data scoring income verification and, so that, that allow you to really expand your lending offerings to consumers and think about those lending offerings different, differently use cases like direct deposit switching and account funding leveraging partners or again, leveraging sort of the data in, not the data out construct. 

Are very compelling in terms of smoothing out the onboarding experiences. And finally, what we're seeing is emerging value propositions that frankly have little to do with the enhancement of existing products. We see partners developing solutions such as subscription management that is a, not a thing that, that. 

Traditionally banks and credit unions are doing this but certainly it is a meaningful enhancement to and to people's financial lives. And, and very much aligned with, was making your clients stronger and putting them in control of their finances. So, I think there's a lot of opportunity, not. 

As a data provider, but also as a data consumer, that, that, that are worth exploring and that fundamentally rely on this ecosystem existing. It is in the industry. So 

Courtney Robinson: yes. So now that you all have given us the business case for open finance, let's get practical about it. 

So, it's one thing to talk about open finance in theory, and another to implement it within your organization. Thea, what does operationalizing open finance look like at PenFed? And how are you functioning cross-functional collaboration and gain buy-in from all your teams? 

Thea Mason: Yes so, it's interesting Courtney, cause what Olga said we're, financial institutions are both data consumers and data providers. And so, when it came time for us to start looking at being the data provider and how best to do that. We, across PenFed, had already been a data consumer for many different applications. 

One of the earliest ones was linking accounts to enable our members to transfer funds between their accounts and other finances. Institutions, but there's many other applications that have evolved since then. Particularly cashflow underwriting and other kinds of opportunities that enable us to be more effective at providing services. 

So, when it came time to focus on how we are going to do data sharing we were able to put together a cross-functional team that already understood the role that open banking and fintechs were playing in the ecosystem and how it was interacting across different business units. So, we had a team that really included it, risk member service and product. 

And they all understood the ecosystem, what was going on, and what we had to do. And then it was about, I think Paul said, how do we focus on what's important? Where do we want to be as an institution and how do we want to evolve? One of the reasons why the team focused on Akoya was we started to think about, we're not in a position to identify which fintechs are going to have staying power, which ones aren't. And then starting to integrate individually with each FinTech would've been an enormous burden for the organization from both a financial perspective, but also, I think it is exceedingly difficult to create resilience and stability. 

So, for us, one of the big benefits of doing the integration with Akoya that I think this cross-functional team found was we integrate once and then and then the fintechs come to AOA and Akoya integrates with them and can serve us as well as the other data providers. And that way if, we have our focus on the stability of our integration. 

And really being confident we're able to support that. We have far less of a financial burden because and as well as, all, it's not just financial. It's, you're each entity then wants a legal contract and, and, audit documents and third party, risk assessments and that becomes quite burdensome overall for an organization. So, the last thing I'll say is by doing one integration, when we started on the journey, we were able to implement it quickly and now and be up and running in a way where. 

We're already providing a lot of access that our members need to their own data and feeling because it's API enabled and not screen scraping so we are much more confident that we are providing them with the data security they need. 

Courtney Robinson: Olga, can you walk us through the initial stages of Zion's Open Finance journey? 

What conversations or internal shifts had to happen for you all to move forward? And for banks that haven't started to think about open finance yet, what advice would you give them on where to begin? 

Olga Hoff: Sure. As we started reviewing the requirements of 10 33 and really understanding what data we would have to, we would have to provide, it became noticeably clear to us that at least in our technical environment, that data had to come from so many different sources. 

And stitching it together into a single source of truth, into a platform where we could leverage for analytics reporting. And that was going to be important before we exposed this data to the API that was to the API layer. 

That was a kind of an important realization for us. Investment, continued investment into the API infrastructure. That was another element of all of this. And we've been on this journey for a while, but it this effort certainly required us to continue leaning in that space. 

And then, also evolving our thinking about what we're building from just this vision of a bolt-on to digital banking to really thinking about it as a distinctly separate channel. And I recognize that, in. There are compelling reasons to think about it as a Bolton too, to digital banking, because if you think about it, the authorization framework from digital banking can be reused. 

But there are also sort of pitfalls in that kind of thinking. Because you are not pushing yourself to, to, to really develop this as a standalone channel with resiliency, reliability, operational support and production support requirements and really use analytics and all the elements and all the hygiene that's required for to. 

For you to kind of look at this as a channel you could be monetizing. And anyway, so evolving that thinking from an execution perspective, technical execution perspective, and then, product perspective, those were probably the key elements of the journey. 

Courtney Robinson: Oh, that was great. Super insightful. Paul, I'm going to segue to you, what are some of the most common roadblocks you anticipate banks could face when it comes to operationalizing open finance and how do they overcome them? 

Paul LaRusso: Yes. Oh, go ahead Paul. I'm happy too. I just wanted to add, because I thought Olga hit a good point on an organizational change. 

I think I start to see like a culture shift within financial institutions as well as they think about this. As a new channel, as a new opportunity to serve customers whether it's expansion of online mobile banking or other channels there's a cultural shift where you start to think about how you can interact with your customers off platforms or through different third parties. 

That was a good point that Olga made. As far as roadblocks that I hear like across the financial industry. Typically, I'll hear two big ones. Like one is just prioritization. There are so many things going on and like where does this stack in the priority list? 

The second is around cost. Okay. I've got to do something. I've got to build; I've got to invest in something and not worry about it. So, on the priority one, it's interesting because once financial institutions really start to get smart on this and get educated, you realize that it's already happening today. 

It's just happening in an unsecure way if you haven't done anything about it. So, consumers are already doing all this stuff. It's not like they're waiting for the bank. Or the credit union or the brokerage house to go and figure this out. Like the consumer has already said, there's an app out there that's important to me, that I want to use it and I'm going to go and figure out a way to use it. 

And so, mostly, unless an organization has started to put up the perimeter security in the blocking. It's happening on the financial institution infrastructure. And that starts to light a switch throughout several folks within the organization that, okay we might not be able to solve everything all at once, but we need to act and start to implement to at least start to have improved security, improved awareness control. 

And it's like these incremental step changes. So just starting and doing something, you start to see some incremental value. I think that's the priority that folks ought to get on the costs. It's interesting, the landscape has changed so much now that there's so many options to actually partner with service providers in the space. 

Whereas when I started in the industry, 10 years ago it was basically like a financial institution had to go and do this themselves, like completely end to end. I worked at Chase, I built something from scratch, and it was, it's a lot of money. It's a lot of time; it's a lot of work to go and stand up. 

And now as you fast forward, there's more partners in this ecosystem. That are helping as serving as service providers to financial institutions. Akoya being one of them there, there's others out there. But the ability now to do this at a much lower cost and a much faster time to market like that, ability to Steve pointed out to your ability to ship. 

And then to accelerate and deploy to not only hundreds, but thousands of third-party applications, like the partnership model has helped enable that. So, I think that's a big item that can alleviate some of those roadblocks. Okay. 

Courtney Robinson: Paul, I'm going to stick with you and ask you, what do you think from a platform perspective, future-ready, open finance strategy should look like? And I'm going to ask you to be completely open here. Give me your thoughts about how banks should be thinking about these FinTech partnerships, especially in the environment we're in with a combination of industry and government-led changes in open banking and open finance. 

Paul LaRusso: Okay, so that was a lot. 

Courtney Robinson: Compound question. No wrong answer. 

Paul LaRusso: Yes, there's a lot there to unpack, but let me go back to just the basics of you've got to start with what you are members and customers are doing today, and you've got to be able to figure out how you can still enable them to do the things you want them to do and do it in a safe and secure. 

Model where the customer or the member has control. And I think by taking a look and understanding that it's already happening, you've got to build something. Consumers want some type of access to this information to do this, and you've got to stand up the technical implementation. So, what does that look like? 

It typically looks like extracting the data from. Your systems of record, you've got to stand up some endpoints, you've got to externalize them. To get ahead of the game, you probably want to standardize these and get these into an industry standard format like FDX, and then you've got to figure out how you implement with the hundreds now, even thousands of third parties in that ecosystem. 

And then you've got to run the engine and kind of manage this operation over time. Hydrate and invest it. It's like a digital channel. So, you're looking at things like response time and availability and all your non-functional requirements of how you upkeep this because ultimately you want to have a great experience for the consumer. 

So, I think of it as there's these three personas. You as the financial institution, you've got to make sure you have the right tools and infrastructure in place for the consumer. You've got to make sure that there's a good experience, it's easy to use. The consumer can manage it and control it. 

And then the third personas, like the third party, that could be the FinTech and aggregator. How do you interact with them? You've got a developer portal, sandbox test environment, and so forth, so you can start implementing all that stuff. So that's the building blocks of just doing the right thing for your customers. 

As far as the regulatory comment, what's, where's that happening? I think it's like a good reminder to ground ourselves in the facts. The 10 33 or personal financial data rights rule. It went into effect in January this year. It is law but the caveat here is that the first compliance dates are not until. 

Mid 2026. As financial institutions are trying to figure out, does the rule stay? I think you're seeing a lot of financial institutions just move and do the right thing for their consumers anyway. But the law, the current rule is currently there's a lawsuit going on, so that's currently being debated. 

Both the plaintiff BPI and the defendant CFPD have submitted their legal briefings. They're now aligned on the concept that the rule should be set aside. There's another trade group called the FTA financial Technology Association, which has intervened. It is now supporting the rule. 

So, I think we're going to have at least some more months of debate and legal briefings before we get a final read. But I would expect we'll see something by the end of year from a readout from the judge. But like I said, in the meantime, we're seeing financial institutions move forward and just do the right thing for their customers. 

Courtney Robinson: Thank you for that, Paul. I know I was like, put it out there. We are about to go into audience questions, but before we do that, I would ask each of you to leave us with a closing thought. What's one piece of advice you'd give to financial institutions starting their open finance journey today, and what does success look like in a world where all consumers have visibility and control over their financial data? 

So, I'm going to start with Paul. Pick on you again. And, 

Paul LaRusso: I look I think ultimately just working in the space along, like starting with the consumer and really understanding what they want what they need, and then how you are going to serve and protect them. It doesn't mean they'll get everything they want, but I think you've got to start with that journey. 

These open banking pipes and experiences are usually, a very small component of a broader task or job that the consumer is trying to accomplish and really understand what that is, and then work backwards from there around how you would protect them, how you would give them more control, more visibility. 

And so forth, and then you can work through the actual building blocks to deliver them but start with the consumer. 

Courtney Robinson: Awesome. Olga, same question to you. What advice would you give to financial institutions starting their open finance journey and what would success look like in a world where all consumers have visibility and control over their financial data? 

Olga Hoff: I think maybe just keying off of what Paul said to some extent the rule when it was issued caused a lot of FIs to look at all of this as a compliance requirement and a kind of security mandate, which, which almost introduced blinders and created a little bit of narrow thinking on the topic, right? 

We have deliberately been stepping back and thinking about this not as a. Compliance initiative and security initiative, security mandate, but more of a product initiative. So, what are we doing to, how can we really productize this? What are we doing? Was this capability to create stickiness, to enhance trust? 

And so it really pivoting the thinking towards business led from. E compliance mandate. That was probably one of our biggest lessons learned. And I, I, the way that this has been developing and Paul alluded to this I think that this thinking will serve as well. 

Thea, 

Courtney Robinson: same question. 

Thea Mason: Okay. Yes. I'm going to pull on a little bit of both Olga and Paul. So when we started the journey and the rule came out, we did see compliance is one aspect of it. But I would say also I think a lot of the FIs haven't yet stepped on to the journey of modernizing data sharing. 

May be data recipients at this point and are receiving data. And I think that gives you a window into what your consumer needs are. And provides a holistic perspective on, on what's necessary. But the piece that was missing and because of the rules specifically, I think, kind of made it challenging when we were starting our implementation was can banks actually monetize their data in some way? And I think, the recent announcements of Chase that came out where they're basically saying we're going to start charging for this data. Because today we're in this environment where the fintechs actually have a tremendous amount of market power. 

And I think that if. If Chase is successful and other large institutions follow, it will shift the balance of power in the marketplace, in the ecosystem. PenFed, being a smaller entity, would like to ultimately do that, take advantage of it. I can remember us talking to Paul about that and it being very unclear where the rule was and whether we would even be allowed to charge for our data. 

But I think given that's somewhat under debate and likely to change and evolve I think also just thinking about being, trying to maintain some flexibility in the future because even though we have an efficient way of supporting open banking, it still requires. 

Expense and investment on the institution side. And while it does inspire loyalty, I think that for now where we sit, the fintechs are getting the better part of the bargain. I, 

Courtney Robinson: That is a good note to turn over to our q and a with I'll say. Thea, Olga, Paul, thank you so much for engaging in this discussion and giving us all this information. 

And I will turn it over to Isabella now to facilitate our Q&A from the audience. 

Consumer Bankers Association: Great. Thank you guys. So, a reminder, if you have questions or comments, you can place them into the q and a box on the bottom of your screen. I know we're approaching the top of the hour, so maybe we'll try to get two or three questions in. 

And if we don't get a chance to get to your question we can follow up with a webinar. So, I'll start with this one question. What advice do you have for smaller institutions that may not have large technology teams, but still want to provide a modern, secure data sharing experience for their customers? 

Paul LaRusso: Yeah, I'll take that one. Reach out to a partner. There are several service providers out there. Akoya is one of them. We'd be happy to engage and initially start with education around, helping the organization get up to speed around what's happening. And then can discuss solutions to implement and so forth. 

The nice thing about right now is there are many options, partners and service providers to work with. 

Olga Hoff: I. And I would just maybe amplify this point. I think the uncertainty around the rule has created a little bit of breathing room for service providers and institutions. 

When everybody was marching towards a milestone the environment was distinctly different. Right now, there's a great opening to go explore this without the pressure of that milestone on institutions that must do just given the uncertainty around the rules. 

Thea Mason: And I could just jump in. I think in terms of being a small institution, you might want to explore, under like our tech stack. We went through a process before we did this of modernizing our tech stack to be an API enabled tech stack too, to begin with. So that when it came to creating integrations, we already had. 

The foundational layer to do that. So, I think, it's also as a smaller institution, prioritizing where you are in terms of the overall digital banking journey, right? Because I think developing a modern kind of front-end system that is a PI enabled is a foundational layer that will. 

Serve you well a as well as you try to plug into the open banking ecosystem. 

Consumer Bankers Association: Thanks guys. See if we can get through maybe one more question before we close out. Let's see. How do you ensure your open finance strategy remains scalable as technology and consumer behavior continue to evolve? 

Olga Hoff: I'll venture with a point of view. I think we all got to experience what it takes to scale digital banking solutions. Right? And I think in some ways the secret sauce every organization has developed. To solve that problem is probably reusable. 

So, you modernize as you go, you modernize as your user adoption grows. And so the same proactive practices of building the resilient infrastructure and the. Funding the operational infrastructure to support, support. This. I, I don't know that there's a ton of uniqueness here in terms of being, being able to be responsive to the market. 

At least that's my point of view. 

Paul LaRusso: Yeah, I'd agree. And I typically look at, in the open banking space, I typically look at two dimensions. There's the network performance. The scalability of the TPS and throughput and capacity and how do you prepare for that and the volume. And then there's the evolution of the data sets. 

So, as data evolves or use cases evolve, you might need to incrementally add new data. But I think the point that Olga made is still true, that it is remarkably like scaling and planning for other channels or projects and programs across the financial institution. 

Thea Mason: Yeah, I don't have much more to add to that. I think Paul and Olga kind of nail nailed that in, in their perspective. 

Consumer Bankers Association: To wrap up, do you have a couple of other questions in there? But I know some people need to head out and I don't want everyone to take up your whole afternoon, but any closing remarks from our speakers?  

Olga Hoff: I appreciate being part of this conversation. It’s a great topic and I really appreciate Akoya’s leadership in this space, so thank you. 

Thea Mason: Yeah I would say the same here. It, I've enjoyed being part of this discussion. I think it's an evolving space. Lots of new things that are happening, and it's been, I think we've had a very good relationship with Akoya and have really gotten a lot of value out of the partnership. 

Paul LaRusso: All right, and I'll just add for all CBA members if you would like to follow up or have any one-off discussions, please feel free to reach out. We're always available to engage and I'm happy to talk to more about the topic with members. 

Consumer Bankers Association: You guys so much and thank you Akoya for joining us. Olga, the as well. Thank you for joining us today and taking part in our discussion. The session has been recorded and will be available for viewing within one to two business days on our site. Yes, thank you all so much and have a great afternoon.