As industry leaders hit the road for Canada’s fall roadshows and Small Business Month celebrations, a critical conversation is taking center stage across the country’s financial advisory sector: what open banking will truly mean for Canadian accounting practices and the small businesses they serve. The overarching question resonating among professionals—from recent discussions at Xerocon featuring industry voices like Jules Hawkins, Co-Founder of Hawkins & Co., and Sarah Bartnicka, Editor of Milk Bag—is precisely how quickly small-business owners will be able to reap the practical benefits of this sweeping regulatory change.
The answer to that question, however, is not entirely straightforward. It will depend heavily not just on the progression of federal legislation and the underlying technological infrastructure, but on whether accountants and bookkeepers are adequately prepared to demystify open banking. Professionals will need to proactively explain complex regulatory shifts, answer nuanced client questions, and help business owners visualize the tangible operational possibilities that more reliable, automated financial data can unlock.
This educational imperative is underscored by a striking lack of awareness in the broader market. According to recent research conducted by Xero in partnership with Angus Reid, an overwhelming 82 percent of 508 surveyed small business owners reported that they had not yet heard of the Consumer-Driven Banking Act. Yet, within that same survey data lies a profound opportunity for the advisory community: nearly half of the respondents indicated that they trust their accountant or bookkeeper above all others to help manage secure access to their sensitive financial data. This dynamic places accounting practices in an exceptionally strong strategic position. When small business owners finally confront these changes, they will naturally look to trusted financial advisors to explain the new landscape and guide them toward informed, secure operational choices.
The Act and where it stands
At its core, the Consumer-Driven Banking Act is designed to fundamentally transform how financial data moves throughout the Canadian economy. The legislation grants business owners explicit legal control over their banking data, establishing a standardized, highly regulated framework that allows them to share that information safely with chosen third-party professionals and financial software tools.
Currently, digital data access is often a fragmented affair, relying heavily on custom connections engineered by software providers with individual banks. In some cases, small business owners still resort to the risky practice of sharing their direct online banking login credentials and passwords with applications just to keep their books updated.
Under the new legislative framework, banks will be legally required to share financial data directly with the owner’s explicit permission through secure, standardized application programming interfaces, eliminating the need to ever share a password again. The federal rollout of this system is structured to happen in two distinct phases. Read access will be introduced first, allowing software and advisors to view transaction data securely, followed at a later stage by write access and payment initiation capabilities.
The legislative process has already seen significant milestones, with the Act receiving Royal Assent in March, followed by the publication of draft regulations in June. Industry projections currently estimate that read access could begin rolling out sometime between late 2026 and 2027, though observers note that exact timelines remain subject to change. For advisory practices, industry experts emphasize that the focus should be on preparing for the inevitable direction of travel rather than waiting for a rigid implementation date.
Why practices should care
The economic and professional implications of open banking for Canadian practices can be viewed through the lens of international precedent. Canada is following closely behind mature markets like the United Kingdom and Australia, where the introduction of similar consumer-driven banking rules served as a major catalyst for accelerated cloud software adoption.
In the United Kingdom, for instance, cloud accounting subscriptions surged from approximately 0.9 million in the 2018 fiscal year to 2.4 million by fiscal year 2022, representing roughly a two-and-a-half-fold increase. Open banking acted as a critical enabler of that digital migration, operating alongside complementary regulatory pushes like Making Tax Digital and the unprecedented operational shifts brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Reliable, frictionless bank data provided undeniable proof of the value inherent in cloud-based financial management. Once clean bank feeds became the standard, small businesses naturally turned to their advisors to understand the broader implications, and cloud-ready practices were uniquely positioned to answer that call and expand their service offerings.
For Canadian practices, open banking promises to significantly reduce the administrative friction caused by unreliable data feeds. Routine operational headaches—such as manually reconnecting broken bank accounts, tracking down missing transactions, and tediously re-entering historical statements—consume countless hours of staff time. By eliminating these manual bottlenecks, practices can free up substantial capacity. This reclaimed time can be redirected either toward taking on a larger volume of clients or pivoting the practice model away from low-margin compliance work toward higher-value advisory services.
With access to fresher, more current financial data, practices can radically transform their client interactions. Instead of waiting weeks after a month-end for static statements to arrive, advisors can facilitate proactive monthly cash flow reviews, forward-looking financial forecasting, and timely mid-month check-ins. For practices actively seeking to build out a robust advisory practice, the arrival of reliable, automated data removes two of the most persistent historical barriers: a lack of timely visibility and a shortage of available time.
Furthermore, business owners will inevitably require expert guidance when navigating the expanding ecosystem of financial apps and services that will request access to their bank accounts. Providing informed counsel on data security, privacy protocols, and access management can easily become a core component of client onboarding. This consultative approach not only builds deep operational trust but gives clients another compelling reason to maintain a long-term relationship with the firm.
Why clients need to hear it from you
Market research consistently demonstrates the tangible value of proactive communication. Business owners who were already familiar with the Consumer-Driven Banking Act through prior exposure were roughly twice as likely to state that they intended to actively utilize open banking services within the first year of their availability. In most cases, the decisive variable separating informed owners from the uninformed was simply that an advisor or knowledgeable professional had taken the time to explain the concept to them.
If accountants and bookkeepers fail to initiate these vital conversations, commercial banks or software vendors are virtually guaranteed to fill the information vacuum. Explaining this regulatory shift is a natural extension of the existing advisor-client relationship, offering a timely opportunity to help clients abandon risky operational habits, such as sharing raw banking passwords with third-party apps.
How start the conversation
Initiating dialogue with clients around open banking does not require a massive marketing campaign or complex promotional materials. Practices can begin simply by incorporating brief, accessible explanations into regular client newsletters, standard onboarding email sequences, or routine review meetings. Advisors should prepare themselves to field inevitable questions regarding data privacy, system security, and legal accountability, remaining transparent about which aspects of the regulatory rollout are fully confirmed and which details are still evolving.
Practices may find it most effective to prioritize outreach toward clients who currently share sensitive banking passwords or those who still struggle with significant volumes of manual data entry. Weaving the topic into year-end reviews and new client onboarding sessions ensures that the message is heard, as most business owners require repeated touchpoints to fully grasp complex regulatory changes.
Getting your practice ready
For accounting firms that have lagged in their own digital transformation—such as those still tethered to legacy desktop software or disconnected spreadsheets—migrating operations to the cloud represents the essential first step in preparing for the future. Practice leaders should audit their current workflows to identify time-consuming tasks driven by unreliable data feeds, then strategically evaluate how that recovered time could be reallocated to deliver greater client value. Forward-looking services like regular cash flow reviews and dynamic financial forecasting represent practical, high-impact areas to begin building out an advisory portfolio.
While Canada has spent years navigating the long road toward open banking implementation, a considerable amount of work still lies ahead for both policymakers and the financial sector. Ultimately, the speed at which small businesses realize the benefits of this modern financial infrastructure will depend heavily on whether their accountants and bookkeepers are ready to lead the way, demystify the regulations, and guide them into the future.
