Protect Open Banking and Keep Financial Tools Affordable

I am writing to ask you to protect open banking and prevent big banks from undermining the financial freedoms Americans rely on every day.

Open banking was designed to put people in charge of their own financial data, ensuring they can securely connect accounts to services that help them budget, shop for affordable loans, use digital payments, and access new tools that make money management easier. The Section 1033 rule affirms that consumers, not banks, own their data and have the right to share it with the services they trust.

But today, big Wall Street banks are working to weaken these protections. They want the power to charge new fees, block access, and decide who gets to use financial tools.  Even worse, this push opens the door to debanking, allowing big banks to cut off access to accounts or services altogether. Allowing a handful of powerful institutions to decide who participates in the financial systems threatens competition, innovation, and basic fairness.

Debanking isn’t hypothetical—it’s happening. Consumers, entrepreneurs, and entire industries risk losing access when banks determine their services are too costly, too competitive, or simply not in the big banks’ interest. Weakening Section 1033 would make it even easier for these big Wall Street banks to shut people out of the system and harder for new innovators to challenge their dominance.

Protecting this rule is about more than apps or data—it’s about ensuring consumers cannot be locked out, priced out, or pushed out by the very institutions that were supposed to serve them.

I urge you to stand with consumers and innovators—not big banks—and keep open banking protections strong