Section 1033 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act gives US consumers a statutory right to access their financial data in a usable electronic form. It is the legal authority under which the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wrote the Personal Financial Data Rights Rule — the US's belated, and contested, move toward mandated open banking.
Dodd-Frank Section 1033
Statute United States
Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act is the fourteen-year-old statutory seed of US open banking. Buried in the 2010 financial-reform law, it grants consumers a right to access information about their financial products and services in an electronic, usable form — the legal authority that sat mostly dormant until the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally used it to write a rule.
- A right on paper, long unused - The statute created the authority in 2010; the market ran on voluntary aggregation and screen-scraping for well over a decade while the rulemaking waited.
- The hook for the CFPB rule - Section 1033 is what the CFPB’s Personal Financial Data Rights Rule stands on; without it there is no US mandate, only aggregators.
- Contested from the start - Unlike the UK’s remedy or Australia’s CDR, the US version arrives into a fiercely litigious environment, and the fight over the rule is a fight over how far §1033 actually reaches.
For most of the period I have scored US banking, §1033 was a right with no teeth — which is exactly why the US produced the widest split of any market: world-class voluntary API-first players at the top and an empty, aggregator-mediated tail below, because nothing forced the incumbents. Whether that changes depends on the rule §1033 finally authorized.
Implemented by these standards
A regulation is the law; a standard is the machine-readable contract that makes it real. These are the technical standards that implement this regulation, catalogued at standards.apievangelist.com.
FDX
The industry data-sharing standard the CFPB rule points to as the qualified interface.
