CUNA ‘concerned’ with CFPB Personal Financial Data Rights Proposal

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released its personal financial data rights proposed rule Thursday, which lays out requirements for financial institutions, card issuers, and other payment facilitation providers to share certain consumer financial data with third-parties at the behest of consumers.  

“CUNA supports credit union members’ and consumers’ ability to access and share their personal financial data while ensuring that the information remains safe, secure, accurate, and private,” said CUNA President/CEO Jim Nussle. “We are concerned with this proposal, particularly that it would require credit unions to create, maintain, and service interfaces for third parties to access member data, but prohibit charging a fee for services provided. At a time when credit unions are being hit with increasing costs just to serve their communities, we’re very disappointed with requiring credit unions to divert time and resources away from member services to subsidize and provide free services to third parties’ competing businesses.” 

The proposal fails to impose proper safeguards to protect consumers from bad actors by only requiring the baseline level of identity information without any oversight or supervision for compliance with the rule of these third-party actors. Furthermore, the Bureau requires financial institutions to shoulder the burden of verifying and authenticating not only the legitimacy of these third parties, but the authorization requests from the consumer without any clear allocation of liability to fraudulent actors. 

CUNA will be engaging with the Bureau over the coming months to ensure the interests of credit unions are appropriately represented in the final rule. 

CUNA submitted comments on the Outline of Proposals and Alternatives to the CFPB’s Small Business Advisory Review Panel in January, including a number of recommendations encouraging innovation to improve consumer experience.