Envestnet | Yodlee (NYSE: ENV), a leading data aggregation and data analytics platform for digital financial services, today announced a joint initiative with two major data platforms Quovo and Morningstar ByAllAccounts to enable secure, open data access for consumers in regard to their financial data.
The three have united to develop the Secure Open Data Access (SODA) framework, a set of consumer-centric principles for data access and financial data security to promote transparency, traceability and accountability in the financial services ecosystem.

The joint principles identify the essential components of a successful data access regime in the United States. Supported by the Consumer Financial Data Rights (CFDR) Group, the principles identify standards that financial technology companies must uphold to enhance financial data security and create more transparency for consumers, financial institutions and policy makers into who accesses consumers' financial data and for what purpose. Since their emergence, financial technology firms have created tools that arm consumers with better insight into their finances. The SODA principles provide standards to maintain this open access to financial data in a secure manner and better position the United States to keep pace with "open banking" advances around the world.

"Through our involvement in existing industry groups focused on data access standards, we have noticed that consumers are not always as top-of-mind as they should be," said Anil Arora, CEO of Envestnet | Yodlee. "The principles released today reiterate our belief that it is the consumer's right to both access their data and permit it to be referenced through trusted third-party tools and applications, and that this consumer-permissioned access should not be limited or restricted."

ITRS has released a set of six fully-supported integrations to monitor key big data technologies used in financial services today including Kafka, Hadoop, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra and Elasticsearch.

More than half of global banks expect to see their technology investment budgets rise by over 10% this year as they beef up cybersecurity and push for digital maturity, according to a survey from EY.

The Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Council has released a new version of its Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) along with new tools and functionality to accelerate adoption of the industry standard.

Robert Half’s new report, Digital transformation and the future of hiring has found that digital processes will be extended to manual, data entry tasks such as financial modelling (41%), generating financial reports (40%), project management and reporting (38%) within the next three years. As a result, payroll (37%), financial planning (33%), accounts payable (38%) and accounts receivable (32%) are expected to be the roles impacted by automation by 2022.

Big data is still big news. For the insurance industry, it’s not just a lot more data although that is part of it; it is data that permits an unprecedented degree of analysis. Only now have we reached a point where data and technology are capable of making use of information we can gather.

Four years after the release of the Principles of Risk Data Aggregation by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the financial industry still faces challenges in fully establishing a “control environment” for data management, according to the EDM Council’s 2017 Data Management Benchmarking Survey Report.