August 2019

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The Consumer Data Right, originally designed to enable open banking, will soon provide consumers more power to compare and switch energy providers…

At Mumbrella’s Finance Marketing Summit, Fred Schebesta, co-founder of comparison site Finder.com, explained how the unassumingly titled Consumer Data Right act will allow customers to switch accounts with ease – and force traditional players to raise their game. But the challenges will also, he argues, bring opportunities to everyone in the market.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is seeking parties to participate in early testing of the new data-sharing system, the Consumer Data Right (CDR). The government earlier this month legislated the CDR, which will allow an individual to request that an institution holding certain data about their use of its services make it available to a third party. The CDR will be progressively rolled out to a range of industries, beginning with banking (Australia’s implementation of open banking), as well as telecommunications and energy. The government says the CDR is intended to make it easier for an individual to shift to a new service provider or employ a data-driven third-party system that can offer insights into their spending.

As Australia’s Consumer Data Right regime edges closer to launch, the ACCC is looking for organisations to help it test the new data portability rules. The ACCC, which is leading the introduction of the CDR, is seeking expressions of interest from parties interested in becoming accredited data recipients and participating in CDR testing.

New protections from evolving consumer data right (CDR) legislation mean data-hungry companies need to step back and consider personal data as “toxic” while they rearchitect consumer relationships on pillars of trust, according to the head of a fast-growing privacy firm that is positioning itself as a data middleman.

“As an industry we seem to have forgotten that it’s not the individual’s job to have to take actions to bring back privacy and security,” Julian Ranger, chairman and founder of personal data-management firm digi.me, told CSO Australia.

“It’s our job as the technology industry to bring back the privacy and the security.”

Australian neobank Xinja has appointed former New York-based neobank Moven executive John Pountain as CTO. Xinja – a bank built for mobile and with no branches – says Pountain is helping build the business with technology that will “change banking for Australians, who never want to walk into a bank branch or join a bank queue”. “Our customers have told us that, as millennials, they do everything differently to their parents, except banking,” said Xinja Bank chief executive officer and founder Eric Wilson.

Across APAC consumers increasingly prefer digital channels for financial services. The trend, combined with regulatory changes that lower barriers to entry, is helping digital-only banks overcome incumbents’ traditional trust and scale advantages, according to new research from Forrester.

Nearly four months after it lapsed in Parliament due to inaction, the passage of the Consumer Data Right (CDR) into law will give consumers unprecedented access to their financial information – as soon as the banks can get their acts together. Pre-election delays to the long-awaited Treasury Laws Amendment (Consumer Data Right) Bill 2019 led to delays in implementation of the CDR, which will underscore an open-banking regime that will give consumers unprecedented access to the information that banks hold on them.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has restated its plan to invest more than $5 billion mostly on technology over the next five years, to maintain its leadership position in digital banking.

The bank today also announced an investment in a ‘buy now, pay later’ fintech, and detailed efforts to fend off the threat of neobanks through improved digital offerings.