April 14, 2026

Today, the Financial Data Exchange (FDX)—a leading technical standards body representing banks, fintechs, consumer advocates, and others—is launching a new initiative to promote safety and innovation when AI agents are used by consumers and companies to transmit sensitive financial account data.  

The need for industry collaboration on this accelerating trend has grown increasingly apparent in recent months.

• Millions of consumers and businesses share their financial data with third-party digital tools to enable easier budgeting, payments, borrowing, and money management.
• Now, AI agents are increasingly being deployed by companies and consumers to make that data move, according to many industry experts involved at FDX. 
• That change introduces novel risks and opportunities that many in the financial services industry are increasingly focused on and eager to stay ahead of.

THE MARKET NEED

When consumers want to share their financial data (e.g., from a bank to a fintech app), plumbing needs to be built to make it happen. In recent years, broad industry collaboration has enabled a majority of user-permissioned financial data sharing connections in North America to be enabled through standardized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) aligned with FDX technical standards. Those standards are purpose-built to provide security, user control and transparency, and traceability.

“Now, just as agentic AI is transforming other use cases and raising the need for new or adapted standards, the same is true for permissioned data sharing,” said Kevin Feltes, CEO of FDX.

INDUSTRY TAKING ACTION

Today, FDX is putting out a Call for Input to solicit broad stakeholder feedback on specific questions related to Agentic AI and its implications for data sharing.

In tandem, FDX is releasing an Exploration Brief, which presents an initial framing of how agentic AI is being used in user-permissioned financial data sharing, the potential implications, and new problem areas to be solved.

These come after a series of industry conversations FDX has hosted about agentic AI in recent months among a broad swath of stakeholders, including major banks, data aggregators, fintechs, and technology companies.

From those conversations, it’s clear that many in the industry believe Agentic AI will have a major impact on how data is shared in the future, making this a top priority issue to address. Indeed, the adoption of agentic AI for data-sharing integrations is already well underway at many companies.

WHAT’S AHEAD

In the months ahead, FDX expects to issue updated technical standards or industry guidelines to promote safe, interoperable integration patterns involving agentic AI.

In doing so, FDX expects there may be opportunities to partner with other organizations who are also working on new Agentic AI standards and protocols in adjacent domains (such as payments), where similar questions arise around agent identification, consent delegation, and security. 

“Broad industry collaboration will be critical in the months ahead to help ensure connections are built in way that protects consumers and promotes trust and transparency,” says Feltes.

Founded in 2018, FDX is a non-profit technical standards body for user-permissioned financial data sharing. FDX’s membership includes approximately 200 organizations. More than 114 million customer accounts are connected today through APIs aligned with FDX technical standards.

Responses to the Call for Input are welcomed through May 29, 2026.

The Exploration Brief and Call for Input are available here.