> “ Mesters says it’s good for people to be cautious, but open banking is really just a new way to share data. He adds open banking can only work with consent and APIs are safer than sharing banking passwords. ”

This is such a weak reason because it’s completely ridiculous to share your banking password with anyone in the first place.

You only need to look at mobile app stores to see that it is very common for apps to ask for more privileges than they actually need. Sometimes this is even justified to “improve” the customer experience. Why would open banking be any different? Imagine you had to grant access to your entire banking statement history in order to purchase a flight. That’s just forced “consent” and we do it every time we visit a web page.

Nobody in open banking appears to be able to adequately answer the following question: “What is preventing you from taking a copy of my data and storing it for later use?”

No, in the golden age of mass automated surveillance advertising, open banking is for trusting suckers I’m afraid.