Open banking regulation should promote secure data sharing while eliminating the need for screen scraping.  

In the United States and Canada, screen scraping is still a common practice, Michelle Beyo, chief executive at consulting firm Finavator, said during this week’s Bank Automation News webinar, “The future of open banking – Payments meet data.” An estimated 9 million Canadian consumers knowingly share their financial data through screen scraping, she said. 

Watch the webinar here.

However, impending open banking regulation in the U.S. and Canada could liberate North American consumers from the unsecure practice of screen scraping while driving adoption of secure data transfers and consent-based data sharing via API, Beyo said. 

With screen scraping, consumers are allowing access to all of their data and insights, but with open banking APIs, only select pieces of data are necessary, she said. Open banking presents control over data “and with control comes this sense of consumer trust.” 

The Clearing House has called for an end to screen scraping by data aggregators and other third parties due to its unsafe nature, Rodney Abele, director of regulatory and legislative affairs at TCH, previously told BAN. 

Webinar panelist Michael Ruttledge, chief information officer and head of technology services at Citizens Bank, agreed.  

With screen scraping, consumers have no control over what data is being shared, he said. However, through open banking and secure APIs “we can control what the customers allow access to at a much more granular level,” he said. 

Through education, FIs are “making [consumers] aware that [open banking] is a much safer way of giving access to your data than just allowing the screen scrapers to come in and take whatever they want,” Ruttledge said.