The number of Open Data ecosystems and industries covered is constantly growing and very soon people around the world will expect free and open access to their data across a wide range of use cases.  But today, these ecosystems end at national or regional borders. The OpenID Foundation is pleased to share the final version of the whitepaper, “Open Banking and Open Data: Ready to Cross Borders?” More than 50 open data, digital identity and API security technologists  globally contributed to this whitepaper to answer the following questions:

1. What are the differences and similarities between different open data ecosystems?
2. Is global interoperability between different ecosystems possible?
3. Who will be driving this movement and what are the use cases motivating them? How will users benefit?
4. How could cross-border use cases work and what “good might look like”? What are the architecture and governance requirements?
5. What can you do if you believe this is the right direction for Open Banking and Open Data?

The good news is that leading technologists already see a viable path to enable Open Banking and Open Data across borders. Our thanks to the contributing organizations and individuals for their efforts over the past year to visualize and distill these recommendations. If “past performance is indicative of future returns,” we can expect their recommendations will become reality in the months and years ahead. The principles and recommendations highlighted in this paper serve as a robust starting point for public and private stakeholder conversations in the months ahead. The intended audiences for this paper are government officials, ecosystem implementers of open banking open data, and experts in the adjacent fields of cross-border payments, data privacy, international trade and digital identity. The whitepaper can be downloaded here. Help us to form the Open Data Community Group to take the principles, recommendations and diligence from this paper to brief public and private sector thought leaders, respond to government and intergovernmental requests for comment, and evaluate the optimal governance entities and approach. To join this interest group in crafting the Community Group goals, participation agreement, and roadmap please contact director@oidf.org.