Nine in ten consumers are willing to share their financial data. So why are banks leaving billions on the table — and losing the very customers they're trying to keep?
For most of financial history, banks enjoyed a peculiar monopoly — not of product, but of inertia. Switching your bank was so painful that most people simply didn't. They complained. They endured. They stayed.
Something broke that spell. Fintechs with one-minute account opening. Apps that visualize your spending before your coffee cools. Loans approved in the time it takes to read this paragraph. Suddenly, switching costs have collapsed — and with them, loyalty.
In our survey of 8,000 consumers across 11 countries, the majority in every single market say they are prepared to switch providers for a better open finance experience. In the United States, that number hits 89%.
This is not a distant threat. More than half of the people who say they would switch — already have.
Click any bar to understand the mechanism — and the opportunity hiding inside each one.
Here is the question that stumps most financial executives. They know their customers are restless. But they underestimate how restless. Make your guess before you see the answer.
Here is where the story turns strange. You'd expect companies struggling to get data consent from reluctant, privacy-wary customers. The data tells a different story entirely.
89% of consumers are willing to share financial data in principle. They want the benefits — faster loans, smarter budgeting, personalized rates. But companies can't unlock this willingness, because they fail at a single, fixable thing: explaining what the data is for.
That's a net loss. Companies that invest in open finance win — but they're still leaving more on the table than they're picking up, because the consent bottleneck eats their gains.
When Mastercard broke down the 89% willing to share data, they found four distinct personalities. Each requires a different unlock. Get this taxonomy right, and the permission gap shrinks dramatically.
The willingness to switch is not distributed evenly. Americans and Australians are remarkably mobile — nearly 9 in 10 ready to leave. Europeans are more cautious. But even the most hesitant markets show majorities on the move.
Not all organizations are equally invested. The data reveals a dramatic performance split between the companies most actively building open finance capabilities versus everyone else. Across every KPI, the leaders pull away.
The winning companies have discovered a compounding loop. It works like this: when companies are clear about value, consumers consent. Consented data enables better AI insights. Better insights produce better products. Better products earn more trust. More trust unlocks more consent. The wheel turns faster.
One Brazilian fintech, RecargaPay, found that customers who used their open-finance onboarding were 38% more active on the platform long-term. That's not a one-time win — it's a compounding advantage. Click each node to explore.
The numbers above are averages. But the mechanism is consistent: active open finance programs generate revenue; permission gaps destroy more of it. Enter your organization's annual revenue to see the math applied to you.
Financial data flows freely in a world where consumers understand the deal. The companies that will win the next decade of financial services are not the ones with the most data — they're the ones who are clearest about why they need it, what they'll do with it, and what the consumer gets in return.
The permission gap is not a technical problem. It's a communication problem dressed up as a technology problem. And communication problems, unlike legacy infrastructure rewrites, can be fixed this quarter.