Competition, safety, and policymaker incentives

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined in this episode by two guests, Steve Boms (Executive Director at FDATA) and Dan Murphy (Founder of Sunset Park Advisors; formerly CFPB).

We're talking about Canada, and why a country that has spent the better part of a decade moving at a pace I have occasionally made fun of in the newsletter is now arguably ahead of the U.S. on open banking regulation.

Dan and Steve walk through how Canada deliberately corrected what other countries got wrong, and how timing and learning play a role, too. Canada watched the BPI lawsuit play out in the U.S. They saw the gap between banks' stated preferences and revealed preferences once implementation became real. They built voluminous, specific legislation partly because they learned what happens when you leave room for interpretation.

The conversation explores the global policy learning ecosystem, the cultural conservatism baked into Canadian financial services (Steve calls it "conservatism with the lowercase c"), and how a Big Five oligopoly holding 90% of consumer deposits accidentally created conditions for comprehensive reform when external pressure finally arrived.

Highlights include:

• Steve's argument that write access might actually solve liability problems by creating traceable ledgers of who changed what and when

• Dan's observation about the Amazon Perplexity lawsuit and how it echoes every open banking access fight 

• The distinction between domestic competition policy and international competitiveness policy, and why they usually point in opposite directions

  
  

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