October 2019

In what could be a huge step forward for open banking in Australia, UK-based fintech TrueLayer has announced its entry to the Australian market ahead of the consumer data right regime’s kick-off in February 2020. TrueLayer is regarded as one of Europe’s leading providers of financial APIs (application programming interfaces) which allow businesses and fintechs to instantly receive data from different sources.

A new sheriff is in town in the form of ever-evolving data privacy legislations and the implicit implications from the recent findings of the ACCC Digital Platforms Inquiry. The presence of data privacy legislation, in the form of the Notifiable Data Breach Scheme and the announcement of the Consumer Data Right in Australia, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, and the impending California Consumer Privacy Act in the United States, have, and will continue to have, an important impact on the way companies interact and engage with their customers and consumers.

Investments in modern business intelligence (BI), augmented analytics and robotic process automation (RPA) will help drive IT spending in the banking and securities sector, according to Gartner. The research firm said that the introduction of open banking in Australia is also driving new technology investments. Gartner predicts spending on IT in finance will reach $18.5 billion in 2020 or a 5.2 per cent increase from $17.6 billion last year at a slower growth rate of one per cent.

Koyo, a fintech startup using open banking to offer loans to people with “thin” credit files and currently poorly served by the market, has closed $4.9 million in funding. The round — a mixture of debt and equity funding — is led by Forward Partners, with participation from Seedcamp. Other investors include Christian Faes (founder and CEO of LendInvest) and Charles Delingpole (founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage). Founded in late 2018 by ex-Frontline Ventures VC Thomas Olszewski, and launching later this year, Koyo is attempting to tackle the problem whereby people without much of a credit history, such as migrants or those who have never taken credit or aren’t the main bill payer, aren’t able to secure a loan.

The most recent report on residential mortgage pricing, published by the competition regulator less than a year ago, rings ominous bells for the big banks as they prepare for another inquiry, announced on Monday.

A new cohort of global fintech players are eyeing the Australian market, with UK open banking software player TrueLayer planning to launch here in 2020, opening the door for its European clients to access to Australian consumers.

Treasury and the competition and privacy regulators are preparing a communications blitz to encourage bank customers to use the government’s “open banking” policy to switch away from the major banks. […] “The expectation is as we get closer to the launch date [February for open banking], it will start to become more prevalent and widely known,” Stephen Bordignon, executive director for the CDR at the ACCC, told the Future Banking Forum.

In July of this year Australia’s first Open Banking APIs went live, under the umbrella of the government’s broader Consumer Data Right (CDR) legislation. […] Adatree, a new Australian technology company specialising in CDR compliance released their first product to market – a simple API that aggregates the first Product APIs available from the major banks.

LIXI Limited has released most of the presentations from the LIXI Forum 2019. This includes the Open Banking API Demo presentation from Biza.IO founder Stuart Low.