In 2026, your financial data is worth as much as your money. While you track your portfolio's performance, several European regulations are quietly reshaping a simple but decisive question: who has the right to see what you own, and what do they do with it?
For a long time this topic belonged to lawyers and compliance teams. It is becoming a concrete question for every investor. Here is what it is about, why it is moving now, and what it changes for you.
Open finance: what does it actually mean?
You are probably familiar with open banking, born with the PSD2 directive: it lets a third-party app access your bank account data (balance, transactions), with your consent, to offer you a service such as an account aggregator.
Open finance is the next step. It extends this sharing principle well beyond the current account: savings, loans, insurance, investment products, pension data. In short, it is the idea that your entire financial life can circulate, upon authorisation, between different players.
On paper, the intention is good. More competition, better personalised services, the ability to switch providers without rebuilding everything. In practice, it raises a question few investors ask yet: as your data circulates, do you still know where it is and who is using it?
Three texts that change the game in 2026
Three European regulations are converging this year and accelerating the shift.
FiDA, the framework for financial data sharing
The FiDA regulation (Financial Data Access) is expected to be formally adopted in mid-2026. It is the text that sets the framework for European open finance: financial data sharing based on the explicit consent of the user. The core idea is that you remain the decision-maker. But you still need to understand what you are authorising, and keep track of who has access to what.
PSD3 and the PSR, reinforced security
The third Payment Services Directive (PSD3) and its associated regulation (PSR) came into force at the end of the first quarter and the start of the second quarter of 2026. They strengthen requirements around fraud prevention and transparency. This is good news for payment security, but it also confirms an underlying trend: financial data is now a regulated, monitored and therefore coveted territory.
The context that gives the topic weight
These texts are not arriving in a vacuum. In the first quarter of 2026, regulators issued close to 500 million euros in fines, with private data breaches topping the list of sanctioned failures. Major institutions were affected, among them Intesa Sanpaolo and France's Iliad group. In other words, a data leak is no longer a theoretical risk: it is a quantified, sanctioned and increasingly frequent reality.
Robo-advisors and AI: the flip side of personalisation
While the framework is being put in place, another trend is moving fast: artificial intelligence is settling into every personal finance tool. Robo-advisors, spending forecasts, automated advice. These services are often useful. But they rest on a simple principle: to advise you, they need to know your wealth, your income, your savings and your goals.
Two questions are worth asking before handing over this information.
First, is your data used to train the provider's models? Many tools use client data to improve their algorithms, which means your financial situation feeds a system you do not control.
Second, is the environment walled off? A telling signal emerged in 2026: 44% of advisory firms that deployed AI tools have no formal validation of their outputs. The first question savvy professionals now ask their providers has become: can we refuse to let our data train your models, and do you have an isolated environment?
If professionals are asking the question, individual investors have every reason to ask it too.
The real issue: taking back control, without giving in to fear
Open finance brings real benefits, and European regulation exists precisely to protect users.
The right reflex is not blanket distrust, but clarity. Three simple principles help you keep the upper hand.
Understand what you authorise. Every sharing consent is a decision. Reading what you sign, and revoking access that has become useless, is part of good financial hygiene.
Distinguish the data that circulates from the data that stays. Not everything needs to pass through a provider's cloud. Tracking the value and allocation of your portfolio, for example, does not necessarily require sending your entire financial situation to a third party.
Choose tools with a clear business model. If a service is free and relies on exploiting your data, that is not a hidden flaw: it is the model. It is up to you to decide whether the service is worth the price.
Where Tukhe fits in this landscape
This is exactly the logic that guides the design of Tukhe. Where open finance organises the circulation of data, and where some robo-advisors absorb income, savings and goals to train their models, Tukhe makes the opposite choice: your portfolio data stays on your machine.
Tukhe is local-first by design. You track the value, allocation and performance of your wealth without any of this information leaving to feed a third-party server or a learning model. This is not a marketing argument grafted onto the spirit of the times: it is an architectural answer to a question that 2026 regulation makes more concrete every month.
This does not make Tukhe a fortress cut off from the world, nor a substitute for your bank or your broker. It is a neutral and durable place to keep a consolidated view of what you own, under your sole control.
What to take away
Open finance is neither a threat nor a miraculous revolution. It is a deep shift: in 2026, your financial data circulates more, is better regulated, but also more exposed and more coveted. FiDA, PSD3 and the rise of AI in personal finance are shaping a world where the question is no longer only "how is my portfolio performing", but "who sees my portfolio, and why".
The right stance is not fear, it is clarity. Knowing where your data is, what you authorise, and which tools genuinely respect your privacy. It is, ultimately, the same rigour you already apply to your investments.
Tukhe is a local-first portfolio tracking application, designed for European investors who want to keep control of their data. This article is educational and does not constitute investment advice.
