Account number portability back on the agenda

The push for bank account number portability has received some new impetus, with a study on banking competition calling for the introduction of account number portability as a way of promoting competition.

The recommendation is included in a study on competition in financial services led by Rob Nicholls, a research fellow at the Centre for International Finance and Regulation.

The report also called for customers to be given access to data held by banks to allow third parties to compare bank offerings across all banks.

Nicholls said a feature of the Australian banking market was that there had been an increase in the number of competitors in Australia in recent years but limited competitiveness.

One way to promote competition was removing the "friction" involved in changing retail bank accounts, he said.

The report said that while reforms were initiated in 2010 to facilitate customer switching, "arguably these reforms were lost in the last change of government and their home in ASIC is by no means the usual or familiar source of information for households."

The UK Financial Conduct Authority commissioned research this year which showed that 35 per cent of consumers and 40 per cent of businesses would be much more likely to switch if they had portable account numbers.

Nicholls said the way to do this would be through the creation of central infrastructure or a central utility model that would include a know-your-customer database and a payment mandate database.

Former Reserve Bank governor Bernie Fraser looked at the issue in 2010 and concluded that the cost of introducing full account number portability would outweigh the benefits. The Government introduced the "tick and flick" reforms as an alternative.

The success of those more modest reforms has never been assessed. The industry's position is that account number portability is unnecessary.

On the issue of customer data, the report said: "Consumers create a rich data trail that is used by businesses to improve their product and service offerings. Currently this data belongs to the service provider. However, it would be feasible to use that data to find the best offering from a range of providers."

Again the report pointed to the UK, where there is a new service called midata that allows consumers to download the data trail they have left.