OpenSME’s submission to Finance Canada on the proposed Consumer-Driven Banking Regulations
Published September 4, 2026
Summary of what we filed
OpenSME has made a written submission to the Financial Sector Policy Branch at the Department of Finance Canada on the proposed Consumer-Driven Banking Regulations, published in the Canada Gazette, Part I, Vol. 160, No. 26 on June 27, 2026. The submission was sent to obbo@fin.gc.ca on September 4, 2026, after the August 26 close of the 60-day comment period.
It makes one central argument: the consent architecture in the proposed Regulations is built for an individual consumer, and it does not fit how a small business actually runs its finance function. It makes three recommendations, and adds two shorter points on the screen scraping prohibition and on accreditation proportionality.
The comment period on the proposed Consumer-Driven Banking Regulations closed on August 26, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. Our letter went in on September 4.
We said so in the first line of the letter, and we are saying it here. The final regulations are still being drafted. A late letter that raises something the record does not contain is worth sending, and it is worth sending honestly. It may not form part of the formal consultation record, and we have no expectation that it will be treated as though it were.
We would rather be nine days late and accurate than on time and dressed up.
The proposed Regulations describe a consumer who requests access to their data, authenticates, gives consent, and renews that consent when it expires. For an individual, that is one person performing four related acts. The design works.
For a small business it comes apart, because those acts belong to two different people.
The person who works with the financial data day to day is usually a bookkeeper, an external accountant, or an outsourced finance team. The person who holds the banking credentials, and the only person who can legally grant consent, is the owner. In most of the small businesses we see, the owner does not open the accounting system in a given month. The finance function runs around them. That is not neglect. That is the arrangement they are paying for, and it is the arrangement that works.
The failure shows up at renewal.
A consent that lapses interrupts a data flow the advisor depends on and the owner is not watching. The advisor cannot restore it, because the advisor never held it. The owner can, but the owner learns about it only when something downstream breaks. In practice that means at month-end close, at a filing deadline, or the week a lender asks for current statements. The framework will have worked exactly as designed and the business will still be sitting there with stale books.
We drew on the Zenbooks Financial Clarity Index, a 2026 national benchmark of 565 Canadian small business owners, weighted to Statistics Canada region, size and sector distributions.
Three findings matter here.
Delegation is associated with better outcomes, not worse ones. Firms whose owners had frequent, multi-touch contact with an accountant scored 67.3 out of 100. Firms with annual contact scored 50.6. Firms with rare contact scored 38.5. Controlling for revenue and headcount, the gap between frequent and rare contact was 28.6 points, the strongest behavioural association in the study.
How the work is staffed does not matter. Whether it is delegated at all does. There was no significant difference between businesses using in-house bookkeeping and businesses using outsourced bookkeeping. What was associated with a materially lower score was the owner handling the function alone, at roughly 11.6 points.
The person who would hold the consent is the least engaged party in the arrangement. Decision-making was the weakest of the five disciplines measured, at 10.0 out of 20. Only 29.1% of owners reported tracking key performance indicators consistently. And 35.2% rated their own financial management as good or excellent while scoring below 60, a level the index treats as limited or moderate clarity.
These are associations, not causal effects. The index did not ask about open banking, data sharing, or consent, and we have not claimed otherwise in the submission. What the data establishes is the shape of the population these Regulations will govern: delegation is normal, delegation is healthy, and the consent holder is frequently not the person watching the account.
Recommendation 1. Recognize a delegated authorization for business consumers.
A business should be able to designate an authorized representative who may grant, manage and renew consent within a scope the business defines and can revoke at any time.
The principle is already familiar in Canadian administration. The Canada Revenue Agency’s representative-access model lets a business authorize a third party to act within defined permissions without transferring the business’s underlying legal responsibility. Small businesses and their advisors have operated inside that model for years. It is understood, it is auditable, and it does not require anyone to invent a new concept of delegated authority from scratch.
Recommendation 2. If delegation is not adopted in the initial phase, fix the renewal mechanics.
Require advance notice of consent expiry to both the business consumer and the data recipient, with a renewal path that does not require the business to repeat onboarding. This is the minimum viable version. It does not solve the structural problem, but it stops the silent breakage.
Recommendation 3. Measure it.
Include consent lapse and expiry rates in the reporting that participating entities provide to the Bank of Canada, disaggregated between individual and business consumers. If this problem is real, it will be visible in the framework’s own data, and it should be visible there before the second phase is designed rather than after.
On screen scraping. The decision not to bring the prohibition into force with the initial implementation is the right one. When the timing is eventually set, we have asked the Department to tie the trigger to demonstrated API coverage of the software small businesses actually use, rather than to a fixed calendar date.
The Zenbooks Financial Clarity Index found a 27.8 point spread between firms with fully integrated systems and firms working mostly manually. It is the widest divide in the dataset. The mostly manual segment is the least likely to be served by an accredited connection early. Ban the bridge before the replacement exists and that segment loses the connection it has and gains nothing.
On accreditation. The streamlined pathways in the proposed Regulations are available to financial institutions and to payment service providers registered under the Retail Payment Activities Act. The professional advisors most closely associated with small business financial outcomes fall outside both categories.
For them, the route is the full application, a $2,500 accreditation fee, and ongoing security, breach reporting, record keeping and annual reporting obligations. That is not proportionate to a four-person accounting practice. We have asked the Department either to provide a proportionate tier, or to confirm expressly that a firm acting under a client’s delegated authority is not itself required to accredit. Either answer is workable. Silence is not, because silence pushes every small advisory firm behind whatever its software vendor happens to support.
The government’s own case for consumer-driven banking counts small and medium enterprises among its beneficiaries.
The submissions on the record come largely from banks, fintechs and industry associations. Several of them supported the OpenSME campaign, and we respect their positions. But the gap described here is not visible from where they sit. A fintech builds for a user who is present. A bank builds for an accountholder who authenticates. Neither of them is looking at the four-person business where the owner has not logged into the accounting system since March and the bookkeeper is the one who needs the connection to stay alive.
That view comes from the practitioners sitting in the middle of it, which is the entire reason OpenSME exists.
OpenSME is a small-business open banking advocacy initiative, launched in August 2025 with one goal: ensuring the interests of Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises were included in the first phase of open banking.
The campaign was backed by 255 signatories and supported by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Fintechs Canada, the Open Finance Network Canada, Xero and Dext, alongside more than 250 small business owners. Its recommendations were published in the Hill Times, Policy Options, BetaKit, the Ottawa Business Journal and Canadian SME Magazine.
The submission was written by Eric Saumure, CPA, CA, founder of OpenSME and co-founder of Zenbooks, an advisory-led fractional finance team serving more than 300 Canadian small and mid-sized businesses. That interest is disclosed in the letter itself. Zenbooks operates in the advisory layer this submission concerns, and readers should weigh the argument accordingly.
The full letter is available as a PDF. Its contents are reproduced in substance above.
Contact: hello@opensme.ca
