Washington Examiner
By: David McGarry

In these digital pages, Alan Sears, the founder of the Alliance Defending Freedom, recently defended the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s so-called open banking rule. The rule is the regulatory offspring of Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act. Sears’s essay proceeds from a sound and worthy premise: a love of religious freedom and robust competition. But it loses itself in a thicket of misapplied principles and misconceptions about its subject.

The open banking rule, finalized in 2024, required banks to transfer customers’ financial data to third parties, including financial technology firms and data aggregators. Besides its heavy-handedness and the nearly impracticability of certain of its provisions, the construction of the data sharing regulations badly endangers Americans’ privacy (dangers of which Sears says nothing). It should be no wonder, considering that the rule was molded, proposed, and imposed by former President Joe Biden appointee Rohit Chopra, an arch progressive incapable of regulatory restraint. The Trump administration, after preparing to abandon the rule in the first months of 2025, now seems eager to preserve it.

Sears’s heroes are the providers of financial services products and data aggregators (many of them with ties to churches) to which, per the open banking rule, consumers’ financial data must be made available. His villains are the banks, by which those data are stored. He endeavors to make two stories into one. The banks, he argues, seek to “[control] who has access to banking institutions and resources,” summoning as evidence both the fees they have begun to charge the financial services that utilize their digital architecture and, attempting to establish an analogue, cases of banks severing relations with conservative customers.