The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) initiated rulemaking that would require banks and other financial institutions to make a consumer’s personal financial data available to them upon request.

The rule would allow consumers to transfer their account history from their existing financial institution to a new one, according to the agency’s outline proposal published Thursday. The CFPB said the change would encourage competition and enable consumers to obtain new financial services offered by startups and financial technology (fintech) firms.

Consumers could also ask their financial data be transferred to a third party, with certain privacy protections in place, to gain access to a budgeting app or other fintech tools, for example. Most third parties currently obtain customer financial data by alternative methods like screen scraping, the CFPB said, which is not secure or, as more personal financial data is encrypted, sustainable.