Louisiana Shouldn't Let Big Fintech Raid Your Bank Account Data

When Congress wrote Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act back in 2010, mobile banking apps were still in their beta versions and nobody was talking about artificial intelligence sorting through a family's checking account. Sixteen years of technological change later, that same provision is now the subject of a live fight at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is weighing whether to issue a new implementation of the rule. Michael Chittom, a conservative activist and Republican State Central Committee member out of Baton Rouge, laid out in a recent Hayride column why Louisianans ought to pay attention before Washington regulators lock in a bad deal.

Section 1033 was meant to give consumers control over their own financial information, the ability to take their data from their bank and use it with whatever app or service they chose. That sounds reasonable enough. The problem, as Chittom explains it, is that exercising that right often means handing sensitive financial data over to third-party intermediaries, what he calls Big Fintech, through terms and conditions almost nobody reads. Unlike your local bank or credit union in Houma or Monroe, those fintech middlemen are not required to meet the same security standards. That gap carries real consequences for who survives and who does not. It is the whole ballgame.

The Hayride reported that a recent Trafalgar Group poll of likely 2026 voters found 89 percent support the idea that any company able to access your financial data should have to meet the same security standards as financial institutions. That is about as close to a consensus number as you will find in American polling on anything these days, and it tells you something important: ordinary voters, regardless of party, understand instinctively that your bank statement is not the same thing as your Spotify playlist. It reveals where you live, where you work, how you spend your paycheck. Chittom's warning is blunt: any outfit willing to pay for that data, legitimate or not, could build profiles not just on adults but on their children too, then sell those profiles to the highest bidder.

Here is where I part ways with the knee-jerk assumption that regulation is always the enemy of innovation. Chittom does not argue for killing fintech or freezing financial technology in amber. He is right that innovation has delivered real benefits, and a Lake Charles small business owner using a budgeting app or a payment platform should keep that freedom. But freedom to choose a service is not the same as freedom for that service to operate with no accountability. A bank in Lafayette answers to examiners and federal regulators who watch its every move. A fintech app pulling the same data off your phone, in too many cases, has none of that. That arrangement tilts the field toward whoever carries less regulatory weight. It is a loophole dressed up as innovation, and it is exactly the kind of regulatory asymmetry that conservatives should be hunting down, not defending because the word "tech" is attached to it.

This is also a reminder that populism and free markets are not opposites when the market in question is rigged. Big Tech and Big Fintech lobbyists have spent years pushing Washington toward rules that favor scale and speed over security and accountability. Louisiana families do not have armies of lawyers to read the fine print on a budgeting app's data-sharing terms. They rely on the assumption that whoever holds their financial information has to answer to somebody. Right now, under the current drift of Section 1033 enforcement, that assumption is shakier than it should be.

The CFPB's decision on how to implement Section 1033 is not finalized, and that is exactly the moment when public pressure matters most. Policymakers in Washington, and the Louisiana delegation that has a seat at that table, should push the Bureau back toward the rule's original purpose: letting consumers move their own data without creating a backdoor for unregulated companies to harvest it. Chittom's column is a useful shot across the bow. Whether the CFPB listens is the next thing to watch.