The Trump administration is doing away with a regulation designed to promote data sharing between banks and third parties. But for Citizens Financial, the move isn’t hindering its bullishness on the broader concept. “This doesn’t change our strategy,” Eric McCabe, Citizens’ head of embedded finance, told. “1033 was focused more on consumers,” McCabe said, adding Citizens has approached open banking as an “enterprise” or business project, combining people from a wide range of departments. That doesn’t directly relate to the 1033 regulation but more about the general market demand for improved data sharing, and how internal collaboration can streamline project management. “Most banks have their own staff for corporate and consumers,” he said. Citizens built its open banking application programming interface to enable clients to have secure and seamless access to their Citizens data from their external platforms of choice, McCabe said. “We then pursued our development in a manner that would comply with 1033, but it wasn’t the driving factor,” McCabe said. The bank has spent more than two years working on its open banking project and has suggested banks continue their own work on open banking and other forms of data sharing. Citizens’ open banking service enables businesses to link their Citizens’ accounts to a third-party platform through an API. Businesses use the API to support permissioned data sharing without using an older practice called screen scraping that has long raised security and privacy concerns among banks. Citizens says its API has reduced screen-scraping usage by more than 90%. “The impetus was to get away from screen scraping. Banks don’t like that. So the APIs give an alternative,” McCabe said. While no one knows exactly what will come next, open banking is here to stay, Kiernan Hines, principal banking analyst at Celent, said in a research note about the uncertainty of the 1033 rule. More than 25% of banks in the U.S. say open banking-led product innovation is one of their three leading technology investment priorities for 2025, according to Celent, though Hines noted that survey was taken before the CFPB’s recent suit. While the CFPB’s recent move to eliminate the 1033 rule will cause the development of open banking to “take a hit,” open banking will continue to grow and has already had a huge impact on financial services, Hines said. “Many financial institutions now view open banking as a genuine opportunity to sit on the other side of the value chain and enhance their own workflows and customer-facing services,” Hines said. “While the rules of the road will continue to evolve, if not formulate, the open-banking toothpaste is out of the tube; customers expect to be able to leverage account data without friction”.