CFPB preparing open banking rewrite to allow bank fees for fintech data access

The original promise — and who wants to renegotiate it

Section 1033 was designed with a straightforward premise: your banking data is yours, and it should be portable. That portability is what lets a neobank show you your Chase balance, or a budgeting app pull transactions from three different accounts into one view — all without you manually exporting CSVs like it's 2009.

The proposed rewrite would introduce a tiered fee structure, meaning banks could start billing fintechs once they hit a certain volume of data requests. According to reporting from This Week in Fintech, this shift follows sustained lobbying from traditional financial institutions. It's not hard to see the appeal for them: data access is currently a cost they bear for the benefit of competitors who use it to attract their customers. A fee structure reframes that dynamic entirely.

What this means if you use a fintech app (and you probably do)

Here's where it lands in your user journey. The apps that aggregate your accounts, automate your savings, or offer you better loan terms based on your full financial picture — they depend on continuous, reliable data feeds. If access starts costing more, we're looking at a classic friction redistribution. Some possibilities: fintechs absorb the fees and margins compress. They pass costs to you through subscription price hikes or feature gating. Or, in the bleakest scenario, smaller players simply stop supporting certain bank connections because the math doesn't work.

Large fintechs and well-funded neobanks can likely negotiate or absorb tiered pricing. The ones at risk are the scrappy tools and startups building on top of open banking rails — the very products that tend to offer the most consumer-friendly choice architecture, precisely because they're competing on experience rather than legacy relationships.

The quiet structural question

There's a cognitive load we rarely notice when everything works smoothly. You connect your account, you see your balances, you move on. The infrastructure behind that moment of ease is exactly what's being renegotiated right now — not in your interest, but in the interest of whoever controls the pipe. If the CFPB finalizes this rewrite, we'll want to watch how individual fintechs respond: which connections they maintain, which they quietly drop, and what new paywalls appear in your app dashboard. The user journey is only as open as the data rules allow it to be.