You now have yet another reason to consolidate your assets with my favored Fidelity Investments: Fidelity takes protecting your most valuable financial information seriously.
Yesterday, it was announced that Fidelity is spinning off software start-up Akoya, a platform that gives customers more control over how their bank-account information is shared. Without a service like Akoya, apps can scrape your account gaining access to information you may wish to keep private.
“The platform,” explains Justin Baer in the WSJ, “aims to put an end to ‘screen scraping,’ the process where the app company’s software obtains the customer’s sign-in information, logs in as that individual and extracts their data. Many banks have grown uncomfortable with this approach, in which apps essentially impersonate their customers, said Peter Wannemacher, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc.” Baer explains:
Akoya executives say banks and other financial firms will pay for the platform so they don’t have to build one themselves or negotiate data-sharing agreements with each of the apps its clients want to use.
“It’s a two-sided network,” said Stuart Rubinstein, Akoya’s chief executive.
To be effective, though, Akoya needs many participants to plug into its network.
By separating from FMR, Akoya seeks to address any discomfort other institutions might have with a platform housed inside a fellow financial-services heavyweight. Fidelity has more than 30 million customers and $8.3 trillion in assets under administration. By bringing in many of the biggest banks as investors, Akoya believes it has locked up enough users on one side of the network to lure app developers on the other.
“When we envisioned building a utility, we realized we might need to spin it out,” Mr. Rubinstein said.
Your key takeaway here is that this is yet another example of Fidelity’s hard-charging effort on the technology front to make sure your investment gets the protection it deserves.
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