Your bank owns the infrastructure your financial life runs on. The fight over whether that bank can charge your budgeting app a fee every time it reads your transactions is a distraction from the real question: why does a private company hold your financial ledger in the first place? In Don’t Let Banks Charge Data-Rationing Fees at National Review, Todd Zywicki argues that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should block banks from imposing volume-based data-access fees when consumers connect third-party apps to their accounts under Section 1033 of Dodd-Frank. Data rationing, the column says, lets incumbent banks toll-gate their own competitors and pass the cost to consumers through higher subscription prices and reduced services. That’s the argument. It’s also the wrong fight.
The column treats the choice as binary. Either the banks extract a fee every time you authorize a budgeting app or a small-business accounting tool to read your transactions, or the fintechs get the data for free and “competition” wins. Pick your toll operator. The actual option — public rails, not private toll roads — never appears on the column’s menu.
Zywicki is right about the immediate harm. If the statute says “shall make available” — and it does — then banks can’t condition compliance on a toll. The point of the law is that you, the customer, get to decide who reads your transactions. Charging per-read turns a consumer right into a usage-based surcharge. That surcharge lands on the consumer eventually: subscription prices, transaction fees, “premium” tiers — the same trick your phone company pulls when you go over your data plan. The column is correct on the statute’s plain text. But that win is a key to a lock nobody’s guarding. The real door is who holds your transaction ledger in the first place.
The column’s own evidence makes the deeper problem unmissable. Zywicki himself writes that “no such limits apply to your incumbent bank, which can and does mine that information without limit to offer new products and services on an uneven playing field.” Read that sentence twice. The bank already extracts unlimited value from your financial life. The column’s answer is to add a second private company to the extraction and call the result competition. The fintechs are not the alternative to the banks. They are the banks in a better jacket, with a slicker app and a faster rake.
What’s actually being debated is not who pays the fee. It’s who owns the rails.
The column closes on the trinity of the comfortable: “Competition lowers prices. Consumer choice drives innovation. Property rights matter.” That’s the prayer that produced the current private-data architecture. The piece is asking the fox to design a better henhouse, then promising you the hens.
The closing examples make the gap explicit. Zywicki gestures at agetech applications that read your transactions to spot early signs of dementia, and at AI tools that will flag fraud and personalize financial advice. Fine. Now ask: who owns the data those tools run on? Who decides what the model learns? Who keeps the gains when your retirement account gets “personalized” by an algorithm trained on the spending of millions of people like you? The column doesn’t ask, because its framework doesn’t allow it. The framework only knows two boxes — incumbent bank, scrappy fintech — and the actual answer doesn’t fit in either.
So here is the third option, the one the column’s framing leaves off the menu.
The financial data infrastructure shouldn’t be owned by the banks. It shouldn’t be owned by the fintechs. It should be a public or cooperative commons, governed by the people whose lives produce the data, and operated the way a public library is operated: everybody pays in, everybody can use it, nobody gets to mine it for private gain.
You don’t have to imagine this. It has been built.
The United States ran a postal banking system from 1911 to 1967, and the post office still has the largest retail footprint in the country. The Bank of North Dakota has been state-owned and profitable every year since 1919. Credit unions — member-owned, not-for-profit, not extractor-friendly — already hold accounts for about 145 million Americans. The Basque cooperative federation runs its own bank, Laboral Kutxa, and has since 1959, alongside roughly seventy thousand worker-owners. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund owns nearly $400,000 per citizen, and it is run by a public agency with explicit ethical rules. None of these institutions depend on building tollbooths around their members’ information. They are the model. They exist.
Section 1033 could be read narrowly — banks can’t charge a fee to read your data, fintechs can read it for free, the private-rail status quo is preserved, and the column gets its win. Or Section 1033 could be read the way the statute was actually written, in a country that used to have a public option for basic financial services and could have one again: your financial data is a public-commons resource, access is a right, and the infrastructure is governed by and for the people who use it.
The first reading wins Zywicki his fight with the banks. The second reading wins yours.
None of this arrives on its own. American banks killed the postal-banking system in 1967, and the lobby that did it hasn’t lost its touch. The CFPB rule is the near-term fight. The commons is the long one. Both are worth having.
North Dakota has run a state-owned bank, profitably, since 1919, and nobody ever called Bismarck the Kremlin. The United States had postal banking for fifty-six years and only lost it because the banks lobbied it out of existence. A public option for financial data doesn’t require a revolution. It requires a CFPB that reads “shall make available” the way it was written, and a Congress willing to put the public option back where the post office used to be.