Capital One Financial : and Plaid Announce New Data Sharing Agreement

By: Becky Heironimus, MVP, Head Of Enterprise Privacy and Data Governance, Capital One

Capital One customers are now able to share their data more safely and securely with thousands of additional fintechs, thanks to an agreement between Capital One and Plaid, a leading data aggregator.

The ways people manage their money are often unique and personal, with new and impactful financial tools emerging almost-daily to better meet their distinct needs. To power these tools in a transparent and safer way, in 2017 Capital One introduced our Customer Transactions Application Program Interface (API), which integrated consumer privacy-protecting features into a single third-party interface.

Through the API, Capital One customers have long benefited from a protected sign-in experience with third parties, direct control over enabling and disabling access to individual accounts, and advanced security features that tokenize sharing of account information. These benefits reduce consumer risk by eliminating the requirement to share personal usernames and passwords with outside parties.

As of May 18th, 2021, 100 percent of the data sharing traffic between Capital One and Plaid is accomplished through the API. Our mutual customers now have control over how and with whom their data is shared, and benefit from the peace of mind that comes from knowing data is shared using advanced security protocols.

What's Next for the Data Sharing Ecosystem

This announcement is an important milestone in creating a financial data sharing ecosystem that is transparent, privacy-focused, and reliable for our customers. Building this ecosystem requires a shared vision for credential-less, API-led solutions and the Plaid agreement is an important step in this journey.

In a future where banks, fintechs, and aggregators are held to uniform standards when using, sharing or storing customer data, building customer trust and security will be more easily realized.

Capital One will continue to work with our banking peers, data aggregators, and individual fintech companies to protect consumer privacy, building a better, more secure data sharing ecosystem where consumer transparency, accessibility, and control are built in values.

You can learn more about our trusted API solutions at the Capital One DevExchange developer platform.