Canada Promised Open Banking by 2026. Now It's Stuck on Who Writes the Rules.

Canada has been "close" to open banking for five years. An advisory committee proposed launching the first phase by January 2023. Ottawa later promised early 2026. Now, with two months left in the year, the system that would let Canadians safely share their banking data with other apps is stuck again, this time over a question that sounds dull and turns out to be political: who writes the technical rules?

The latest holdup "makes it all but certain that open banking will miss its promised launch in 2026," The Logic reported on October 27. The government still has not named a technical standards body, and the obvious candidate is American.

What Is Holding Up Open Banking in Canada?

A standards body. Open banking, which Ottawa calls consumer-driven banking, needs a common technical language so that banks, credit unions and fintech apps can pass data back and forth securely. Most of the industry already speaks one, the Financial Data Exchange (FDX), which launched in the US in 2018 and came to Canada in 2020. When FDX arrived, 31 Canadian financial institutions signed on, with RBC and Interac executives joining its board, The Logic reported at the time.

The rules for choosing a body changed along the way. The 2024 law set four criteria: safety, security, transparency and good governance. Budget 2025 added three more, covering whether the body is Canadian, how independent it is, and whether it complies with Canadian law. Abraham Tachjian, Finance Canada's former open banking lead, told The Logic the industry sees FDX as "the de facto standard," and that the new conditions reflect what Ottawa considers important when it "nominates, essentially, the infrastructure that communicates Canadians' financial data."

In other words, Ottawa is weighing digital sovereignty against speed. Finance Canada spokesperson Marie-France Faucher told The Logic only that "the designation is pending."

What Did the Competition Bureau Say?

It wants the system, and it wants more of it. In a submission dated Friday, October 23, the Competition Bureau said it "welcomes the proposed regulations and their alignment with a pro-competitive regulatory framework." Its recommendations push further than the drafts. It urges Ottawa to "work swiftly towards implementing write access," meaning apps could move money and not just read balances. It also wants rules kept proportionate so small firms can enter, and public reporting on whether competition actually improves. On the standards body, it asked only that it "operate in a fair, open, and accessible way."

The Bureau has been making this case since its 2017 fintech market study, which called for "broader 'open' access to systems and data through application programming interfaces." In a 2019 submission, it pointed out that about 18% of digitally active Canadians had used multiple fintech products, compared with 33% in other markets. The gap is the point. Canadians have fewer real alternatives to the big banks than people in comparable countries.

Why Does Open Banking Keep Getting Delayed?

Because every step has landed on someone else's timeline. The Consumer-Driven Banking Act passed in pieces, first in the 2024 budget bill and then in Bill C-15, which received royal assent in March 2026, according to law firm Blakes. Budget 2025 moved oversight from the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada to the Bank of Canada and pushed write access to "mid-2027, once Canada's Real-Time Rail project is live," Torys noted. Payments Canada's Real-Time Rail is itself targeting a fourth-quarter 2026 launch.

Draft regulations finally appeared in June. Finance Canada said then that "approximately nine million Canadians currently share financial data through screen scraping, exposing them to security, liability, and privacy risks," in its announcement. Even the Bank of Canada's own advisory committee, which includes RBC, TD, Wealthsimple, Plaid and Flinks, was asking in May "when the Technical Standards Body will be designated," according to the meeting summary.

Industry patience is thin. "Call it what you want, but copy and paste what the standard is," Beem Credit Union CEO Brian Harris told The Logic. "We make things harder that don't need to be harder." Marcelo Prates of Wise warned that creating a new Canadian body "sounds like years."

Is Waiting for a Canadian Standard Worth It?

There is a real case for caution. The US has its own open banking troubles. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recognized FDX as a standard-setter in January 2025, but a federal court has barred enforcement of the underlying data-sharing rule while the agency reconsiders it, law firm Cooley notes. Handing the plumbing for Canadians' financial data to a body whose home market is in regulatory limbo is a fair thing to worry about.

The cost of waiting is also real, and Canadians are paying it now. The UK, which mandated open banking years ago, passed one billion cumulative open banking payments this summer, Open Banking Limited reported, with 18.8 million user connections in June alone. Meanwhile, Canada's big banks blocked third-party AI agents from logging in to customer accounts this week, citing exactly the password-sharing risk that open banking was designed to remove. Every month without a safe, regulated channel is another month of screen scraping or of no access at all.

Wealthsimple made the simplest argument in its September submission: "A published date gives every institution the same deadline to meet and the certainty required to complete the work." Canada does not have that date yet. Sovereignty is a legitimate concern, but it should come with a timeline. Ottawa could adopt FDX's existing standard under Canadian governance, set a firm launch date and build a domestic body alongside it. Five years of "almost" is long enough.