If you’ve ever tried to change banks, you know how much of a hassle it is: trying to find and provide different documents and data. But now, it’s easier than ever to make the transition.
As of Sunday, Australia’s big four banks are allowed to share data a whole lot more of you data with each other — with your permission.
This is under Australia’s Consumer Data Right (CDR), a framework launched by the government earlier this year to automate data transfer between organisations.
For individuals, the CDR is meant to streamline the process of moving your information from one place to another (a key part of Europe’s very progressive GDPR scheme). And this comes in handy when you need to provide a lot of information to an organisation, like when you’re applying for a home loan at a different bank.
This, in theory, is supposed to give consumers more choice by reducing friction instead instead of being tied to one place because it already has your data.
Under the CDR, a user must opt-in to the service. When they do, they can authorise one organisation to be able to access their data from another. People can also withdraw access to these data at any time, and the provider must delete or de-identify data they collected.
Organisations have to apply to become accredited to be able to access the data. In practice, the CDR is really an API and a standardised data format.
When the CDR first launched, customers of the big 4 banks could share some data from their personal accounts. And the latest update includes home and personal loans as well as joint accounts, closed accounts, direct debits, scheduled payments and payees in the scheme.
And while this is only for the big banks at the moment, soon it’s going to be rolled out to the energy sector. In the not-too-distant future, people will be able to transfer data about their current energy provider to other providers to get a quote based on all their data.
And while there are concerns that the restrictions around the CDR could be loosened in the future, the CDR is making it simpler for people to take their data where they want it, for now.