Open finance refers to the sharing of personal and non-personal customer data held by financial sector intermediaries and other data holders with third-party providers for the purpose of providing a broad range of financial and information services.

The objective of open finance is to support the development of more innovative, data-driven and personalised financial services, improve customer experience, and help customers and firms make more informed financial decisions. By facilitating the aggregation and reuse of financial data across providers and products, it may also strengthen competition and support the further integration of EU financial markets.

In the EU, data sharing in finance was first implemented in the payments area through the open banking framework introduced by PSD2. Open finance extends this approach beyond payment-account data to other categories of financial data, including lending, savings, investments, pensions and insurance data.

To support this extension, the Commission proposed in June 2023 a framework for Financial Data Access (FiDA), establishing rights and obligations for customer data sharing across financial services, excluding payment data and certain sensitive data such as creditworthiness and life and health insurance data. FiDA requires standardised data-sharing schemes and technical interfaces, and establishes a framework for the authorisation of financial information service providers, while ensuring that customers retain control over who can access their data and for what purpose. At this stage, FiDA remains under negotiation, with the objective of reaching a political agreement in 2026.

The proposed FiDA framework builds on the data-sharing requirements of the GDPR and the broader EU data framework, notably the Data Governance Act, applicable since September 2023, and the Data Act, applicable since September 2025. It will also need to be implemented consistently with the ongoing reform of the EU payments framework under PSD3 and PSR, which reached provisional political agreement in November 2025. More broadly, progress on digital identity and interoperable data-sharing tools at EU level should support the practical development of open finance.

At the international level, open finance and broader customer-directed data-sharing frameworks are also progressing. The OECD has published policy considerations on open finance, while jurisdictions such as the UK, Australia and Brazil have developed concrete frameworks or advanced implementation; in the United States and Japan, approaches remain more fragmented and sector- or market-led.