Dear Director Chopra:

My name is Jack Solowey, and I am a policy analyst for financial technology at the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. I appreciate the opportunity to comment on the Required Rulemaking on Personal Financial Data Rights (Proposed Rule) of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB or the Bureau), which addresses financial data sharing obligations—or “open banking” provisions—under Section 1033 of the Dodd Frank Act. 1 The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace, and the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives focuses on identifying, studying, and promoting alternatives to centralized, bureaucratic, and discretionary financial regulatory systems. The opinions I express here are my own.

The Bureau must amend the Proposed Rule to realize its stated goals of promoting interoperability and competition within the financial services ecosystem.2 Specifically, the Bureau must modify its approach to industry standard setting to remove regulatory obstacles, not impose them anew; clarify and narrow overbroad definitions of terms that would unreasonably encompass ancillary activities; and resolve tensions between the terms of the proposed rule and the Bureau’s conflicting interpretation thereof.