Data Governance in the financial sector – New intermediaries and Gaia-X

Via the Gaia-X initiative representatives from business, science and public administration of different European countries aim at developing a competitive, secure, open, trustworthy, federated data infrastructure on the basis of European values. The goal of the project is the establishment of a lively digital eco-system that guarantees data sovereignty and enables its users to provide, share and combine data in a trustworthy manner. The Data Governance Act (DGA) proposed by the European Commission pursues similar goals. The DGA offers the possibility to create neutral data intermediaries in specific sectors which shall facilitate and support data exchange between companies, research institutes and public entities. The interaction between Gaia-X and DGA might establish a new, complex regulatory regime which offers different actors diverse legal, economic, political as well as societal options for action. Against this background the ad hoc-project aims at researching the interaction between Gaia-X and DGA and the resulting regulatory landscape, thereby focusing particularly on the decentral provision of financial data.