Capital One Financial Corporation (NYSE: COF) and Finicity, a leading provider of real-time financial data aggregation and insights, have signed a data sharing agreement that enhances access and security through Capital One's Customer Transactions application programming interface (API). As a result, Capital One customers can more securely share financial data with the third-party apps and services that Finicity supports in a way that is safe, secure and within the customer’s control.

“Finicity is hyper-focused on delivering the data insights our partners need to drive their services and enable their customers to make better financial decisions. This starts with superior data access, quality and intelligence,” said Finicity CEO Steve Smith. “Capital One has proven to be an excellent partner in pursuing these common goals of empowering consumers to have more access to their financial data and better manage their financial health.”

Establishing a formalized API integration with the bank allows the broader FinTech and financial services community to more securely automate needed financial account data while delivering a variety of apps and services for financial management. The result is significant time savings, added stability and greater accuracy. Capital One customers will also have increased control over how and when their data is used.  This secure access to data provides the ability to have an on-demand and accurate view of their finances.

“Technology is enabling us to bring waves of new financial tools into the marketplace,” said Becky Heironimus, Managing Vice President of Enterprise Digital Products and Data Connections at Capital One. “We know many of our customers actively use and rely on third-party services to help them manage and track their finances, and we appreciate the value these services provide. Our agreement with Finicity helps our mutual customers take full advantage of their platform. Through the API, our mutual customers can securely connect with thousands of leading fintech applications and enable access to accurate account information that gives them control and transparency over how and when they choose to share their Capital One financial data.”

The API used in this direct-access relationship leverages Open Authorization (oAuth) technology to eliminate the need for the user to share their banking credentials with third-party apps. Instead, it is replaced with secure, tokenized access providing direct authorization through Capital One. Finicity has established relationships with a wide variety of service and application providers that allow individuals and organizations to manage financial processes and payment initiation. This includes providing data aggregation for several of the most popular PFM (personal financial management) tools available on the market today, generating Finicity verification reports for many of the largest lenders and supporting ACH verification for innovative payment providers, among other services.

Once the API-based method of data sharing is in place – customer migrations are expected to start in Q1 of 2019 – Capital One customers can directly and securely connect with financial tools and services that use the Finicity financial data API.