Your Financial Data should travel with you 

Imagine a small business owner in Bengaluru who needs a working-capital loan in a hurry. The old way meant weeks of paperwork: bank statements printed and stamped, income documents notarized, a lender squinting at PDFs trying to guess whether the numbers were real. 

She opened her lender's app, selected her bank and mutual fund accounts, approved a consent request, and within seconds her verified financial information was securely shared with the lender. No paperwork. No email attachments. No screenshots. The loan was approved the same day.  

That single tap represents one of the biggest shifts underway in financial services. 

It isn't just about faster lending. It's about something much more fundamental: your financial identity becoming portable.  

The Habit we're used to 

For most of banking history, your financial information has lived in silos. Your bank had a picture of your spending. Your insurer had a picture of your risk. Your card issuer had a picture of your credit behavior. None of them talked to each other, and you were the only one who could stitch the picture together — usually the hard way, with printouts and phone calls. 

"Open banking," which spread across the UK and Europe in the late 2010s, cracked that open a little. It let you connect your bank account to budgeting apps and other services, using secure digital pipes instead of screenshots. It was useful, but narrow — mostly limited to current accounts. 

What's coming next is bigger. The goal is to make more of your financial life—from bank accounts and investments to insurance and pensions—digitally accessible and shareable across institutions, with you deciding who gets access and why. People are starting to call this "open finance." Think of it less as a new app and more as a new habit—much like switching mobile providers without having to change your phone number. Nobody thinks twice about it now. Financial data portability is on the same trajectory. 

Europe Opened the Door 

Open banking began in Europe with PSD2, giving consumers secure access to their bank account data through standardized APIs. Europe is now writing the sequel. Regulators are now extending that vision through the Financial Data Access (FiDA) framework, a proposed European Union regulation that expands open banking into open finance, aiming to make savings, investments, insurance, pensions, and other financial products portable under customer control. The details are still being negotiated — including an interesting fight over whether large technology platforms should get the same access as banks and fintechs. But the direction is set. European regulators are betting that an economy where consumers, not institutions, decide who sees their financial history is a more competitive, more innovative one. 

India Is Showing What Open Finance Looks Like at Scale 

India is already putting many of these ideas into practice at population scale. While Europe is writing the next chapter, India is already demonstrating what it looks like in practice. India is already building many of the pieces needed for this future. Account Aggregators allow customers to share financial information across banks, investments, insurance and pension providers with explicit consent. DigiLocker makes verified documents digitally accessible and shareable, while CKYC is designed to make KYC information reusable across financial institutions. Together, these systems are creating the infrastructure for a financial identity that is increasingly portable. 

What began as a simple idea has grown into a financial data-sharing ecosystem operating at remarkable scale. India's Account Aggregator ecosystem has reached significant scale. As of March 2026, more than 2.88 billion financial accounts were enabled for consent-based data sharing, while 284.6 million accounts had been linked by users. While most consumers may not know the term "Account Aggregator," they're increasingly using it behind the scenes whenever they apply for digital loans, investments, or other financial services. What started with lending is expanding across banking, investments, insurance, pensions and wealth management - a working example of an entire economy deciding that financial data should move as freely, and as safely, as the person it belongs to. 

Europe pioneered open banking. India has shown how open finance can work at population scale. Together, they offer a glimpse of how financial data may move across the world in the coming decade.  

Why this matters more than it sounds  

Data portability may not sound as exciting as instant payments or digital currencies. But beneath the technical details lies a change that could reshape how financial services work. 

Every big shift in payments has come from removing friction that people had simply learned to live with. Contactless cards removed the friction of typing a PIN. Instant payments removed the friction of waiting three days for money to move. Open finance removes something less visible but arguably more valuable: the friction of proving who you are financially, over and over, to institution after institution. 

When that friction disappears, new things become possible. Loans that approve in seconds instead of weeks. Insurance priced on your real financial picture instead of a generic risk category. Eventually, loyalty and rewards could follow you between providers instead of resetting every time you switch banks. And, eventually, financial credentials could become easier to carry across borders when you move. 

None of this requires a new currency, a blockchain, or a breakthrough in cryptography. It requires something simpler and, in some ways, harder: institutions agreeing to let go of data they've long treated as a competitive moat, and regulators building the plumbing to make that handoff safe. 

The winners of the next decade may be those who make financial identity portable—not just those who build the next payment rail.