JPMorgan Chase has reached a milestone five years in the making — the bank says it is now routing all inquiries from third-party apps and services to access customer data through its secure application programming interface instead of allowing these services to collect data through screen scraping. The New York bank made this announcement on Thursday. "It's a big win for our customers because they get greater control over their data and more visibility around which applications will use the data and which accounts they will be sharing with those applications," Paul LaRusso, head of data aggregation at Chase, said in an interview. Data sharing ‘Screen scraping is not evil’: Bankers, fintechs, aggregators face off A CFPB event on data-sharing issues gave the parties a chance to debate the merits and risks of screen scraping, what can replace it and what consumers really want. By Penny Crosman February 27 Chase started signing data-sharing agreements with fintechs and data aggregators including Envestnet Yodlee, Finicity, Intuit and Plaid in 2017. At the same time, it built an API channel so customers could share their data in a more secure fashion than letting these services access their login credentials. In 2020, Chase outlined more details about its plans, including the dashboard customers could use to grant and revoke access to outside services. "It's not a flick of a switch," LaRusso said. "There are thousands of third-party applications our customers are using to manage a budget, pay a bill, apply for a loan or prepare taxes." The bank spent more than two years phasing out screen scraping and migrating companies to the API, which also happened in phases depending on when the bank signed data-sharing agreements. Customers using a third-party app that needs access to Chase will log in and authenticate themselves directly with the bank. The customer can choose which accounts and data to share with the third party, as well as turn off access via the Security Center dashboard on Chase's website or app. Chase and other major banks have made other progressions to end screen scraping in recent years. It is one of 11 banks to own the Akoya Data Access Network, which helps participants handle their data-sharing relationships and enable multiple API connections. In early 2021, it was one of the banks to pilot — and then sign onto — the Streamlined Data Sharing Risk Assessment offered by The Clearing House and the risk-assessment providers TruSight and KY3P. The goal of this service was to produce standard risk assessments of data aggregators. Hello, and welcome to Protocol Entertainment, your guide to the business of the gaming and media industries. This Friday, we’re taking a look at Microsoft and Sony’s increasingly bitter feud over Call of Duty and whether U.K. regulators are leaning toward torpedoing the Activision Blizzard deal. Call of Duty is starting to sink the Activision shipFor Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition, the fate of Call of Duty is starting to look less like a bargaining chip and more like a deal breaker. On Wednesday, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority, one of three pivotal regulatory bodies arguably in a position to sink the acquisition, published a 76-page report detailing its review findings and justifying its decision last month to move its investigation into a more in-depth second phase. Microsoft hit back — hard — and accused the CMA of parroting the talking points of its prime competitor, Sony. But the Xbox maker has exhausted the number of different ways it has already promised to play nice with PlayStation, especially with regards to the exclusivity of future Call of Duty titles. Unless Microsoft is able to satisfy Sony’s aggressive demands and appease the CMA, it now looks like the U.K. has the power to doom this deal like it did Meta’s acquisition of Giphy. The CMA is focusing on three key areas: the console market, the game subscription market, and the cloud gaming market. The regulator’s report, which it delivered to Microsoft last month but only just made public, goes into detail about each one, and how games as large and influential as Call of Duty may give Microsoft an unfair advantage.
Microsoft responded with a stunning accusation. In a formal response, Microsoft accused the CMA of adopting “Sony’s complaints without considering the potential harm to consumers.”
Sony is playing a savvy, but disingenuous, game. The PlayStation maker has come out against the deal to the CMA and other regulators around the world, but in many ways the tactics it says it fears Microsoft may employ if it owns Activision Blizzard are the very same tactics Sony has relied on for many years.
Picking sides in this increasingly bitter feud is no easy task. Microsoft does indeed offer platform perks Sony does not, and we can imagine those perks extending to players of Activision Blizzard games if the deal goes through. But Microsoft is also one of the world’s largest corporations, and praising such colossal industry consolidation doesn’t feel quite like the long-term consumer benefit Microsoft is making it out to be. It’s also worth considering how much better off the industry might be if Microsoft is forced to make serious concessions to get the deal passed. On the other hand, Sony’s fixation on Call of Duty is starting to look more and more like a greedy, desperate death grip on a decaying business model, a status quo Sony feels entitled to clinging to. “Should any consumers decide to switch from a gaming platform that does not give them a choice as to how to pay for new games (PlayStation) to one that does (Xbox),” Microsoft wrote. “Then that is the sort of consumer switching behavior that the CMA should consider welfare enhancing and indeed encourage.” The Activision Blizzard deal now depends on how convincing that argument is. A MESSAGE FROM QUALCOMMEvery great tech product that you rely on each day, from the smartphone in your pocket to your music streaming service and navigational system in the car, shares one important thing: part of its innovative design is protected by intellectual property (IP) laws. |