Bank-owned tech company Symcor shrinks its open banking team

Bank-owned tech company Symcor has significantly shrunk the size of the team working on its financial data-sharing platform over the past year amid uncertainty over the future of open banking, The Logic has learned.

Last week, Symcor’s senior director of open banking Jason Dodokin posted on LinkedIn that he was leaving the company and “open to exploring new opportunities.” His departure is part of a pattern of layoffs, staff attrition and shrinking resources on Symcor’s open banking team, multiple former employees told The Logic. The former employees, who asked not to be identified because the information is not public, cited leadership that lacked expertise, delays in Canada’s progress on open banking and difficulty signing up clients for its data-sharing platform as factors that have contributed to the team’s struggles.

Asked about the layoffs, spokesperson Amy Maraone said in an emailed statement that Symcor continues to be committed to open banking and its data-sharing platform, called Cor.Connect. She said there has been “no attrition” from existing open banking clients.

“Naturally, investments and related resourcing evolve with the needs of the business,” Maraone said, noting Symcor has open roles on its payments and open banking team and has plans to grow its sales team for Cor.Connect. “We have enjoyed significant momentum over the past year, despite external factors.”

As The Logic has previously reported, Symcor’s effort to market Cor.Connect as a secure hub for sharing data between banks and fintechs has faced roadblocks. Symcor is a joint venture between some of Canada’s biggest banks—TD Bank, RBC and BMO—and the degree of control lenders are able to maintain over how their data gets shared is a high-stakes issue with a long history of adversity in Canada and the U.S. Fintechs have been reluctant to sign up with Cor.Connect out of concern the banks would eventually force them to use the platform to obtain customer data to power payments, budgeting apps, accounting software and other services.

Though Symcor was established in 1995, it is mainly known for its cheque processing and other payment services and is relatively new to the software world. One former employee said the company struggled to hire qualified leaders, causing frustration and staff turnover.

“Leadership didn’t have the right strategy, didn’t have the right domain expertise, and we just weren’t going in the right direction,” they said. “We were basically treading water.”

Maraone disputed that characterization, saying Symcor’s open banking team has “strong leadership.” She pointed to an open banking leadership award won by senior vice-president Saba Shariff, payments and open banking vice-president Joyce Wong’s 15 years of experience in financial services products and Symcor’s strong technology team.

Cor.Connect markets itself as a secure, homegrown alternative to American data aggregators like Plaid and Yodlee, which help fintechs and other businesses acquire consumer banking data they need to operate. The only other major Canadian financial data-sharing platform is Flinks, which is owned by National Bank.

When secure data feeds aren’t available, financial data aggregators use a workaround called screen scraping, requiring customers’ banking logins so bots can copy account data into spreadsheets for the customer’s software to access. Screen scraping has been criticized by regulators and privacy experts as insecure, and by fintechs as unreliable and error-prone. Symcor has been a consistent critic of screen scraping and Cor.Connect promises to use secure data feeds, or APIs, instead. 

Ottawa has committed to launching open banking by early 2026, at which point banks will be required to provide customer data through APIs. For now, however, National Bank is the only major bank to release an API. Symcor’s screen-scraping-based competitors offer fully functioning products, but Maraone confirmed Cor.Connect is still in pilot mode.

Symcor had trouble signing up clients amid the uncertainty, one former employee said. They said the company has shifted resources from developing the Cor.Connect product to pitching future customers. “It’s probably a big pause, keep the lights on, and whenever the banks and others are ready, probably pick it up,” they said. “At the end of the day, there needs to be adoption.”

Additionally, Ottawa’s announcement last December that banks will have to share data free of charge under open banking upended Symcor’s planned business model for Cor.Connect, another former employee said. Symcor had been banking on being able to sell the data, they said: “The whole premise of that model just went out the window.”  

Maraone did not directly address the effect of the December announcement on Symcor’s business plans, but said the company has “had to remain agile in response to government timelines and decisions.” 

As Symcor worked hard to gain the trust of fintechs, it also had to contend with other pressing priorities faced by banks, including a global trade war, anti-money-laundering woes and regulatory chaos south of the border. 

Banks “hunker down,” one former employee said. “They go back to basics when there’s uncertainty or a higher degree of risk.”

Andrew Spence, an economist and financial consultant, said Symcor’s step back from Cor.Connect might be good news for open banking in Canada if it means opening the door to more competition from outside aggregators. He said Ottawa should go a step further and clarify that Canadians own their financial data. 

“It’s my data that the banks have, and I don’t think they should own it or control it,” he said. “They’re merely the custodians of it.”