The FDX strategic survey provides an inside look at where leading financial firms are prioritizing technical standards work for consumer-permissioned data sharing and how the marketplace is maturing. Specific to the 2021 survey, FDX members indicated a desire to prioritize work on consent and sensitive data across the organization’s many work streams including the FDX API, data use cases, user experience and security.

“FDX’s annual strategic survey is really unique since FDX is the only market-led financial industry standards body whose membership spans the entire financial ecosystem including financial institutions, fintechs, financial data aggregators, payment networks, consumer groups, financial industry groups and other stakeholders. Our strategic survey gives us an overarching perspective from all elements of the financial ecosystem and unique insights that informs our work,” said Don Cardinal, Managing Director of FDX.

The annual survey guides FDX prioritization of future technical standards initiatives and offers an opportunity for FDX to gather critical feedback that informs future goals. Specifically, FDX’s strategic survey asks its members to prioritize further expansion and enhancement of the organization’s key market deliverables like the FDX API specification, user-permissioned financial data use cases, User Experience Guidelines, Security Guidelines, and global features. The survey also gathers FDX member sentiment on the organization’s role in the marketplace, desired outcomes and FDX’s future expansion and evolution.

While full survey results are only available to FDX members, some of the survey’s key findings include the following:

For the FDX API specification itself, FDX members ranked consent API, satisfying use cases that currently need sensitive data, notifications capability for new data or changes like consent revocation, and bill pay for OFX parity as the highest priority functions or enhancements needed in the FDX API.

In terms of FDX’s User Experience Guidelines, survey respondents listed definition of consent, consent revocation, consent modification, consent management, and definition of data clusters as priorities for the coming year.

Regarding user-permissioned financial data use cases, FDX’s survey found that its members prioritize defining previously identified use cases in the following order: money movement setup, fraud, tax & accounting. In addition, respondents suggested that FDX pursue new use case work in the areas of account opening, wealth management, customer service, back-office operations, inter-bank money movement, lending, marketing, security, banking activities and next best offer.

For FDX Security Guidelines, FDX members were unanimous in ranking security control and design patterns for sharing sensitive data as the highest priority for the organization, while also listing digital identity, FAPI security profile and conformance, and trust frameworks and verifiable identity data sources instead of user account credentials as priority focus areas for FDX.

From a global perspective, FDX member respondents unanimously voted Canada specific specification extensions as the highest priority with UK Open Banking specifications and shared signals specifications from OpenID listed as the second and third priority respectively.

FDX members indicated that implementation guides, reference implementation, certification and an FDX directory and registry should be top product and services priorities for the organization in 2021, while also indicating that personal identity and KYC obligation fulfillment tools, trust framework and new data sources like payroll, travel, utilities, and retail should be in FDX’s future scope. Finally, FDX respondent members indicated that FDX should prioritize its market role in driving adoption of the FDX API, expanding use cases, seeking interoperability with other standards and maintain its industry leadership role as a thought leader and facilitator.

“FDX is already one of the most comprehensive open finance APIs in the world having defined over 500 financial data elements that consumers can permission access to and FDX has over 12 million consumers using the FDX API. And yet, this strategic survey is evidence that our consortium is as motivated ever to continue enhancing and expanding the FDX API specification to meet the needs of the marketplace. We are excited about the year ahead,” added Cardinal.

The 2021 survey responses were well aligned with only some slight priority variations between market segments. Respondents were also spread across the financial data ecosystem including financial data providers like financial institutions; financial data recipients, like fintechs and other third-party financial technology applications and services; financial data access platforms, like data aggregators and ecosystem utilities; and other stakeholders like financial industry groups. Respondents were also generally representative of FDX’s overall membership with 75% of responding firms in the US and 25% of firms in Canada.