AP Images
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon.
- JPMorgan signed an agreement with financial technology company Plaid that will give its customers better control over their personal data.
- Plaid connects bank accounts with fintech apps like Robinhood, Venmo and Acorns.
- The deal marks an important development in how JPMorgan is thinking about fintech companies and the financial data they touch.
JPMorgan on Monday signed an agreement with Plaid, a technology company that connects bank accounts with fintech apps like Robinhood, Venmo, and Acorns, that will give its customers better control over their personal data.
Plaid will access JPMorgan's customer data through a secure application programming interface or API, allowing customers to share their financial information more easily and safely. Banks including JPMorgan have pushed back against so-called screen scraping, another way for fintech apps to companies to access customer data that generally is viewed as less secure.
"This is an important milestone between JPMorgan Chase and Plaid because it reinforces some of the principals around customer control and security," said Paul Larusso, JPMorgan's head of Digital Data Sharing and Aggregation. "It reinforces the principle in the industry that data should be securely transmitted through API, and not through screen-scraping."
The agreement facilitates a feature on Chase's bank account, dubbed "Account Safe," that allows Chase customers to see which applications are using their data. Customers can then decide whether they want to share the data with external apps.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has previously said that fintech companies that aggregate financial data present risks to consumers because of the amount of private data they collect. But since then, the bank has struck agreements with several other data aggregators in the last few years including Intuit and Finicity.
The deal with Plaid reemphasizes those themes that Dimon has been vocal on and helps the bank to provide customers with a safer and more secure way to transmit their personal information, Larusso said.
The announcement with Plaid also comes as the company is meeting with potential investors about raising money that could value the firm at more than $2 billion, Business Insider previously reported.