Prior to COVID-19, nearly three-quarters of Americans had already been using websites and mobile apps as the primary means to access their bank accounts. Today, with many consumers concerned about going to their local bank branch, online channels are quickly becoming our only option for financial management.

In fact, new research shows that 63 percent of people are now more inclined to try a new mobile or online service than before COVID-19. The coronavirus has already driven a 72% increase in usage of fintech apps in Europe. It is clear these trends are global, consistent across firms, interrelated, and here to stay.

The novel coronavirus is the catalyst that is quickening the adoption of Open Finance, where people give consent to share their financial data with third-party tools and apps of their choice. However, this shift has placed a significant challenge on the industry’s IT infrastructure.

Whether due to heavy trading or multiple daily logins, in times of market stress, financial institutions are seeing an overload of traffic which creates a vicious cycle of slowed service and lower customer satisfaction. The first victims of this vicious cycle are data aggregators and fintechs whose access to financial institutions’ digital properties could be interrupted due to system constraints. If there is a high volume of online activity, banks must preserve bandwidth that is already at a premium by limiting third-party bots that repeatedly ping their servers to scrape data.

As more consumers go online for financial services due to COVID-19, the industry must adapt to ensure that data recipients—including data aggregators and fintechs—have reliable access to consumer data, while financial institutions and other data providers retain enough technical capacity above peak activity. This means moving away from using consumers’ login credentials and screen scraping websites to adopting application programming interfaces (APIs) and tokenized access as the preferred method of financial data sharing.

This will create a safer, more efficient data access ecosystem that can scale across financial services and prevent future data-sharing issues during crises. However, for the industry to transition to APIs, both data providers and recipients must begin implementing shared standards that accelerate API-enabled data access in three primary areas: consumer-permissioning, data-access agreements, and open API specifications.

Standards are needed to ensure consumers’ needs come first. They are the ones who must control and permission access to their personal financial data, as specified by the principles laid out by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The onus is on data providers to provide consumers the ability to give designated data recipients access to their account information, monitor those that have been granted access to their data, and easily modify or revoke that access at any time.

Additionally, we have recently seen several announcements between financial institutions and individual data aggregators or fintechs for API-based data access agreements. This is a great sign, but if every one of the industry’s thousands of data providers must negotiate and implement one-to-one arrangements with each of their data recipients, the process will be lengthy and unscalable. A standard data-access agreement and security assessment accepted by both sides will provide a legal foundation for parties to quickly partner with one another.

Lastly, while there are several data providers at the forefront of open APIs with fully developed portals to facilitate integration with data recipients, most are not there yet. As they build their APIs, all players in Open Finance should adhere to the free and interoperable API standard overseen by the Financial Data Exchange (FDX). If the industry can adopt a shared technical foundation, we can ensure scalability and predictability when facilitating access to data, authenticating users, and systematizing data semantics and syntax.

Adopting consumer, legal, and technical standards are a win-win for all parties who need safe and secure financial data sharing. APIs will provide secure, reliable connections that allow for scalable access to data, eliminate breakages in service, and remove the need for multiple API integrations and screen scraping routines. Standard legal agreements will reduce negotiation time and hasten data-sharing partnerships, while consumers get all the benefits above, plus transparent control over their data.

Not only is standardization a core component of innovation in financial services, it is critical at this moment with COVID-19 pushing even more consumers online. By taking decisive action now to adopt uniform APIs, data-access agreements, and consumer principles, we can unlock the potential of Open Finance.