Open finance, FIDA and private banking: The race for data.

With FIDA, the planned European framework for access to financial data, the view of data changes fundamentally. While open banking under PSD2 focused mainly on payment accounts, the European Commission intends with FIDA to extend access to customer data to further areas of the financial sector. On the Commission’s official information page on Financial Data Access, it explicitly refers to an open finance proposal that should enable responsible access to data from private and business customers across a broad range of financial services.

For private banking institutions, this is neither a technical side issue nor a classic compliance topic that could be turned into a project when the time comes. It is a strategic fork in the road. Because the moment data become standardised, available at the customer’s request and interoperable between market participants, competition shifts. What matters then is no longer solely who formally serves the client, but who can build a robust overall picture from distributed information. That is where the real tension in the topic lies.

The legislative process is further along than many institutions still perceive internally. The European Commission tabled the proposal as early as June 2023. In 2026, too, DG FISMA treats the negotiations on FIDA explicitly as an ongoing dossier. That does not suggest a merely theoretical endeavour, but a regulatory package that continues to be worked on at European level. Anyone who still assumes the topic can be set aside until a distant final version underestimates the anticipatory effect such a regime already has today on market standards, architecture choices and strategic priorities.

The real risk is therefore not only regulatory. The greater danger is that other market participants learn in the meantime to work faster, more precisely and more relevantly with consolidated financial data. New providers do not need to occupy the classical position of a private bank first to become client-close. It is enough if they can, with the customer’s consent, bring information together, present it clearly and derive better digital or advice-adjacent offerings from it. That is the shift that makes open finance so demanding for established houses.

This development is particularly delicate in private banking, because here proximity to the client has traditionally been equated with advisory strength. In future, proximity alone will not suffice. Anyone who cannot produce a viable overall picture of the wealth situation risks seeing only a slice of the client’s financial reality despite an intact mandate relationship. That may still work for individual conversations. For demanding wealth planning, it will not be enough in the long run.

Nowhere is the reach of this development clearer than in wealth planning. Good wealth planning advice lives on completeness. It needs not only custody data at a single bank, but ideally an integrated view of liquid investments, equity stakes, credit relationships, retirement provision, insurance and cross-border structures. This is where the limits of grown ways of working become visible in many institutions. Spreadsheets, presentations, CRM entries, emails and individual notes may work day to day. What is often missing is a data foundation on which analysis, classification and decisions can build systematically. FIDA does not create that weakness first, it makes it more visible.

The bar for good advice therefore changes as well. In future, not only the quality of the conversation, the strength of a presentation or the length of a mandate relationship will be in the foreground. What will count is how robust the data model is on which that advice actually rests. Because an institution that holds information only in fragmented stores will not advise better automatically even with better data access. Without structure, operational disorder often grows with data volume. The strategic advantage lies therefore not in access alone, but in the ability to process.

Many institutions still discuss open finance as if it were mainly about accessing data. That view falls short. The real value emerges only where data are ordered, linked, plausibility-checked and placed in a professional context. An additional data stream does not lead to better advice at first, it leads to more information. Better advice emerges only when an institution recognises risks from that information, makes coverage gaps visible, identifies succession questions earlier or prepares structuring options on a sounder basis. That is why open finance in private banking is not a mere IT topic, but a question of operational architecture and the substantive connectivity of advice.

Switzerland is not standing still outside this development. It does not yet pursue a regulatory approach identical to FIDA, but the infrastructural direction is clear. SIX describes bLink as a standardised, scalable and secure platform for exchanging financial data. At the end of November 2025, SIX also announced the launch of multibanking for retail clients in Switzerland. According to SIX, customers can bundle accounts from several banks in a single app; at launch eight banks and two fintechs were connected, while more than 30 banks had already provided the required interfaces. That is not a European FIDA regime, but a clear indication that the Swiss market, too, is moving towards open, standardised data connectivity.

For Swiss institutions this means no all-clear, but a different kind of pressure to act. Less regulatory compulsion brings more room to design, but also heightens the responsibility to clarify positioning early. Anyone who relies on the absence of immediate mandatory requirements risks being overtaken by changing client expectations, new infrastructure standards and international competitive pressure. The real question is therefore not whether this topic reaches Switzerland. The question is which institutions will already have workable models by then and which will only begin to react when others have set the standard.

Many institutions are still waiting for full regulatory clarity. That very waiting can prove a strategic mistake. Because what must be built now cannot be made up in a few months. It is about clean data models, interoperable system landscapes, controllable consent processes and an advisory logic that actually creates value from distributed information. Anyone who starts only when the last political details are settled will hardly enter this transition from an advantageous starting position.

Against that backdrop, for many institutions the question is less whether they should engage with open finance, but how early and with what strategic clarity they do so. WAISON works on these questions at the intersection of data structure, processes and advice in the financial environment.