In the journey towards widespread global open banking adoption, Australia is cutting a unique path of its own.

The core difference between open banking in Australia and, say, the UK, is the local government’s top-down policy-led approach through the Consumer Data Right (CDR).

Essentially the CDR gave Australians the right to access not just all their financial data but also their utility, telecoms data and more, over a series of phases in the coming years.

This groundwork covers a broad scope of financial products, everything from mortgages and personal loans to credit cards and business accounts.

And, after a slow start, momentum seems to be growing as open banking reaches its 2nd birthday.

Two of the country’s largest banks, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), are both expected to launch their first open banking use cases later this year.

Australia’s end goal is clearly far more ambitious than where open banking currently is in Europe—where policymakers are still wrestling over the first step of expanding from banking data to other financial products.

Yet this great ambition brings with it more complexity.

Australia’s state of play

“We have a government that is really playing the long game, in terms of the benefits they’re looking for,” says Gareth Gumbley, CEO and Founder of Frollo.

“And we have a much richer and deeper data set to work with because of that.”

Frollo is the Australian equivalent of an Account Information Service Provider (AISP), making it easy for fintechs and banks, like ANZ, to access open banking data and then use it to create products or services.

The hold-up, according to Gumbley, is the lack of accredited data recipients, i.e. those who can ingest the data which the big banks are exposing.

Coinsmart. Beste Bitcoin-Börse in Europa
Source: https://australianfintech.com.au/unpicking-the-australian-open-banking-opportunity/