Hi and welcome to the August Monthly Fintech Macro.

I have spent a lot of time reading US political news this month, so that’s where we will start off. Of course rates have yet to be cut but there is always more to say about that. Should we be worried about stagflation? Does open banking still exist? Who is going public? A lot of questions to answer and think about for this month.

1. The CFPB is not done with Open Banking

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau seems to still have some life and reopened open banking rules, promising consumers more control over their data. In reality, this is a question of compliance. 

While DOGE and Vought effectively weakened the CFPB, we’ve seen some states pick up where the CFPB left off. New York state sued EWS, the operator of Zelle, for being scam-friendly and doing too little to prevent fraud - a lawsuit that the CFPB had dropped. The question for open banking this time around is whether U.S. regulators will actually force banks to share data, or if it again becomes a moot rule. 

As with New York State’s EWS lawsuit, will more regulatory actions come from individual states? This will then lead to questions of enforcement as no rulings will have federal scope requiring widespread compliance.