Ten of the largest professional associations in Fintech and the Crypto called President Donald Trump to intervene in what they say to be a coordinated attack by Big Banks to stifle innovation and lock competitors.
In a letter sent Wednesday, the groups, which include the Blockchain Association, and the Crypto Council for Innovation, warned that the JPMorgan plan to charge costs for access to consumer banking data threatened millions of Americans and could paralyze the adoption of stablescoins (USDC, USDT) and self -portfolies.
At the center of the fight, the Americans finance portfolios and digital exchanges. Aggregators like Plaid and MX allow consumers to transfer funds from their bank accounts to platforms like Coinbase or Kraken. These connections are based on direct access to the data collected by the user.
Until now, banks have enabled this access to no charge costs. However, JPMorgan began to inform the aggregators that they will have to pay for this – exceeding up to $ 300 million per year for a single plaid, which would represent more than 75% of the company’s income.
“Let’s be clear: financial data belongs to the American people, not to banks,” said the letter. “By questioning open banking services, the biggest banks are directly opposed to your vision of making America the world capital of financial innovation.”
The letter urges the White House to act before July 29, when the administration should file a legal file in the legal battle concerning the rule of open banks of the consumer financial office.
The open banking rule of the CFPB, finalized at the end of 2024 as a 1033 rule, obliges banks to give consumers free access to account data and allow them to share them with third -party services.
The rule was intended to level the rules of the game between banks and fintechs. But the banks continued to block it the day it was finalized, and the CFPB has since asked the court to leave the rule entirely.
In an article on X, Kraken Arjun Sethi’s CO-PDG described the JPMorgan movement a “calculated change” which transforms the data generated by users into a toll, warning that the industry is witnessing a familiar centralization scheme transformed into control.
“There is a version of the future where each financial interaction is intermediate by monitoring systems, the price and access to the door to your own data,” he wrote. “The crypto has an alternative. But this alternative is not guaranteed.”
