June 8, 2016 — I hear often from third party vendors that the “heavy-handed” data access or integration practices of Reynolds and Reynolds and CDK Global is a dynamic unique to the automotive industry. That’s not exactly the truth. An intriguing article in American Banker magazine this week highlights the struggles the banking industry is having with small data aggregators grabbing customer data via screen scraping.

Banks are starting to create API connections for third party vendors to use to access data they need to serve their customers. It’s a strategy similar to what Reynolds and Reynolds implemented more than 10 years when it created the Reynolds Certified Interface (RCI) and Dealer Data Exchange (DDX) launched by CDK last year.

Both programs are controversial, in part because of what each DMS vendor charges to be a certified vendor — which is an area the American Banker article failed to explore. We could write a book on this topic, but for now, we wanted to highlight that the banking industry is having a similar debate.

Read our previous reports on what is happening in data security at the dealer level (Data Security).