Schutz der Robo Advisor vor Marktbarrieren: Zugriffsrechte auf Banken-Schnittstellen?

The development of Robo Advice offers bank-independent FinTechs the opportunity to capture shares of the market for investment advice, brokerage and the management of financial instruments. In the long run, however, they will only be able to assert themselves as independent providers if they have all the technical options at their disposal to further improve and, above all, to individualise their offering. This would be the case if they could offer their clients the opportunity to analyse assets and liquidity developments across all custody and banking accounts to implement, on this basis, defined portfolio strategies and to meet liquidity requirements. To do this, however, they would need access to existing bank interfaces. Against this background, we analyse the extent to which instruments of competition law protect Robo Advisors from impediments by banks or even force banks to facilitate market entry by independent Robo Advisors. We also discuss whether it would be desirable to provide external service providers with access to bank interfaces via financial market regulation. To this end, we draw parallels with market access of providers of payment initiation services, the establishment of which the banks sought to prevent through coordinated measures, but which was ultimately protected both by cartel enforcement by the Bundeskartellamt and by the reform of the Payment Services Directive. We show that Robo Advisors could use the new rules of payment services law and the existing technology for account information services to extend their own functionalities.

Franck, Jens-Uwe and Dimitrios Linardatos (2019), Schutz der Robo Advisor vor Marktbarrieren: Zugriffsrechte auf Banken-Schnittstellen? , ZEW Discussion Paper No. 19-045, Mannheim.