After weeks of simmering tensions, the battle between fintech firms and banks is finally spilling into the public eye—and it’s pitting factions of the fragile Trump coalition against each other.
At its core, the skirmish is around open banking, a policy first introduced in the 2010 financial Dodd-Frank reform that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was set to finalize, 15 years later. Fintech firms like Plaid championed the concept as a consumer-friendly approach to controlling your own data and making it more freely transferable between different institutions, like JP Morgan and Robinhood. Banks, predictably, were not so thrilled, raising alarms over security risks.
