Good afternoon to the chair, vice-chair and members of the Standing Committee on Finance. My name is Alex, and I am the executive director of Fintechs Canada.

Fintechs Canada is an industry association of Canada's most innovative financial technology companies. Our members collectively serve millions of Canadians on a daily basis.

Economic growth has slowed. Life is increasingly unaffordable. Canadian productivity has reached emergency status. At Fintechs Canada, we believe in whole-of-government solutions to problems like these.

One critical part of the solution needs to be boosting competition in banking, because our banking sector is partly to blame for the problem. That means passing the bits and pieces of an open banking framework we're starting to see in Bill C-69 without delay.

More competition in banking will make life more affordable for Canadians. Canada's banking sector is heavily concentrated, with little change over the past decade. Canadians pay higher banking fees than consumers in similar markets, such as the United Kingdom and Australia.

Canada's big banks make more and more of their money from what's called non-interest income—in other words, fees. These include account and investment management fees, payment processing fees and administrative fees on mortgages and other loans.

More competition in banking will also boost Canada's productivity. Canada's economy is mostly made up of small businesses, but Canada's small businesses receive less financing from our banks and pay more for it than their peers in other countries. Weak investment in Canada's small business community is a long-standing issue. How can our economy run at its best when the engine has no fuel to run on?

Consumer-driven banking will help boost competition in banking by putting consumers in control of their financial information. Suppose you're a recent immigrant who can't qualify for a loan because you don't have a Canadian credit history. With open banking, you can reliably and securely share your monthly rent payments with Borrowell's Rent Advantage app to build your credit score.

Maybe you're a small business and you don't want to rely on spreadsheets to manage your books. You can use open banking to reliably and securely share your transaction data with accounting platforms like Xero to automate your bookkeeping.

If you're having trouble tracking investment accounts at different banks, there are apps that let you view and manage them in a single dashboard. However, to share your data securely and reliably, you need open banking.

By empowering Canadians to reliably and securely share their financial information, Canadians will be better able to vote with their wallets. They can decide for themselves who will serve them best. What's more, Canadians can do this without having to decipher who's the most secure and resilient because of the consumer protection that comes with open banking.

As I have written before, open banking isn't really about opening the vault of financial data. That much has already happened. It's actually about closing it again and putting Canadians in charge, letting Canadians decide whom it can be open for, when it can be opened, how long it can be opened and for what purpose.

This is why Canada needs the consumer-driven banking act. It also needs a regulator such as the FCAC, well equipped for the job of policing the industry. The longer we wait, the further and further we will fall behind our G7 counterparts, who have already put their financial sectors to work to make their economies more competitive, affordable and productive.