The banking sector is examining how established players might work with each other, and with fintechs, to come up with an acceptable and legal way to share customer data.Pip Freebairn, associate director with the Australian Bankers Association opened the discussion sessions at the ABA's first Open Data Symposium with this: "We need to work through issues of security and privacy for customers to in the best way to do that, working together as an industry to build consensus and find the right solutions for customers."One overarching theme of the symposium, hosted by CBA in its new Innovation Centre, was the recognition that the whole sector needs to do more - if for no other reason than avoiding the risk of an agenda being controlled by a regulator. "Making it easier for customers to securely access their data and share is undoubtedly good for business and good for competition," was the message from Pete Steel, CBA's executive general manager, digital. "The key word in there is 'securely'" said Steel, adding: "when we talk to our customers, they are much more worried about cyber attacks and identity theft" than risk from sharing data.Steel said a recent survey of several thousand Australians found that currently only seven per cent were comfortable sharing their financial data with a start-up, "so clearly our industry has a big role to play to understand when and how they can comfortably share their data safely." "In this digital era, customer security must be the foundation of our industry going forward. We need to come up with a well-designed and robust model."Secondly, it means we need to think beyond technology and instead focus on customer education. "Third, it means as an industry we have the opportunity to learn from other models, recognising that no one yet has cracked these key, tough problems."A first step was to learn from the experience of the UK in implementing its open data regime.David Beardmore, commercial director at the Open Data Institute, speaking via Skype from the UK, said the issue came to a head last year when the UK's Competition and Markets Authority published a paper titled "Making banks work harder for you". The CMA concluded that older and larger banks did not have to compete hard enough for customers' business, and smaller and newer banks find it difficult to grow.The CMA introduced a series of remedies - except that these apply only to the current account holders at the UK's nine largest banks which between them cover over 80 per cent market share of retail customers. Another mistake that Beardmore conceded had been made was to concentrate far too much on the technology and nothing on what the changes would mean for consumers."At the launch event for the CMA report in September there were over 200 people sitting in a conference room in St Paul's in London with not one person representing consumers," he said."[We have] no indication of what successful delivery of these mandates looks like."