Finicity, Fiserv Ink Secure Data Access Agreement

Open banking technology platform Finicity, a Mastercard company, and payments and financial services company Fiserv, Inc., on Wednesday (March 30) announced a data access agreement so that Fiserv’s financial institution clients can enable consumers to securely share their account information.

The data sharing comes through apps that use Finicity’s open banking platform, providing access to a range of financial services and improved overall financial literacy.

Through the partnership, Finicity can access tokenized consumer data through the AllData Connect from Fiserv’s portal, allowing consumers to consent to share their financial data with third-party apps. AllData Connect issues an identifying token in place of the consumer’s username and password, and the third party provides that token to the financial institution to access the consumer’s data.

“Banking relationships remain central to most peoples’ financial lives, yet they also expect to access their financial data when and where they want,” said Justin Jackson, head of product for digital payments at Fiserv.

“Direct connections via APIs eliminate the need for consumers to share usernames and passwords with third parties, providing convenient and simplified access to their data in a more secure way,” he said.

Through AllData Connect, financial institutions can gain insights about their customers and the third-party apps they are accessing, the announcement said.

“The strong payments connectivity between Mastercard and Fiserv via tokenization, traditional processing and beyond extends across infrastructure, applications and services to the secure and highly reliable API connections we’re enabling through open banking,” said Ryan Christiansen, SVP, data access partnerships at Finicity.

Related: Fiserv Acquiring Finxact for Digital Banking Acceleration

In February, Fiserv agreed to acquire cloud-native banking solution Finxact, Inc., as part of the next step in its digital banking strategy, allowing increased account processing, digital and payments solutions.

Under the terms of the deal, Fiserv will acquire the remaining ownership stake in Finxact for approximately $650 million after being an early investor in the company shortly after it was founded in 2016.