JPMorgan Chase has entered into a data-sharing agreement with aggregator Envestnet Yodlee in an effort to enhance customer control over their account information.

Paul LaRusso, managing director of digital platforms at JPMorgan Chase, explained that the agreement, which was confirmed this month, gives customers control of information third-party apps use through API-based connections.

“This agreement will give our customers more visibility and control as they use these financial apps. Our customers will actually know what information they’re sharing, which Chase account [data] they’re actually going to share, and who they’re sharing it with,” he said. “The customer may want to share their Chase Sapphire credit card information, but they might not want to share their Chase mortgage information.”

The practice of screen scraping allows a third-party app to log into a banking application as if it were the customer, ‘scrape’ their financial data and paste it into external platforms. With the new agreement, customers’ banking information will be seamlessly connected to more than 1,200 third-party apps through an API that tokenizes customer information.

The agreement was developed over 18 to 24 months and is an ongoing effort from the bank to stamp out screen scraping. Chase customers will also have the ability to manually control the information that third-party apps will have access to through Chase mobile apps. 

“Think of it as a dashboard where you would be able to see which applications you’re sharing your information with, which accounts that application can access, and you can control that access and turn it off at any time,” LaRusso explained. 

This is not the first time Chase has entered into agreements to allow secure API-based data access. Last year, it signed a similar agreement with Plaid, and prior to that, it inked agreements with Intuit and Finicity. Russo noted that several million Chase customers can securely share data with third-party apps as a result of these partnerships. The bank will continue to implement this strategy until no customers can connect to third-party apps through screen scraping.

See also: With Plaid, Wells Fargo gives customers a new lever to control their data

Stuart DePina, a chief executive of data and analytics at Envestnet Yodlee, said that banking customers are increasingly asking for a better user experience with their data.

“None of the username or password ever leaves the Chase [digital] environment, so that in and of itself reduces the [number of] instances where the sensitive information can be deployed outside of the ecosystem,” DePina said. 

In addition, the partnership allows both parties to access better quality data when connecting customers’ information to third-party apps. According to DePina, API-based connections to third-party platforms ensure account data that’s shared with third parties is up to date.

Both JP Morgan Chase and Envestnet Yodlee are board members of the Financial Data Exchange, a nonprofit dedicated to unifying the financial industry around a common standard for secure and convenient consumer and business access to financial data. 

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