The imperative for Australia to expose its banking and financial sector to an open data regime has been getting an airing time and again of late, and a likely timeline would see it in place in 2018.Vocal proponents of open banking, notably Jost Stollmann, former CEO and now executive director of Tyro (Australia's only payments technology firm to be granted a banking licence) have demanded it sooner rather than later."One of the big barriers [to real competition from fintechs against the major banks] is that the major banks think they own their customers' data. The second barrier is that the bank thinks it owns its core banking system and can thus control access to it," Stollmann told an audience of finance and banking professionals at the Thomson Reuters Australian Regulatory Summit on Tuesday."If open banking was to actually materialise, then these major barriers to banking would fall. Open data, open ('application programming interfaces') would eliminate those competitive obstacles." Stollmann also warned that having a sale to a major bank as an exit strategy "is fine but not really changing the game."Now it seems at least two major banks are opening up to the idea of open banking, with news that they're investing in fintech hopeful, Basiq, a start-up launched early this year which claims to have Australia's first open banking API platform. Based in Sydney, Basiq's core platform promises to allow fintech companies to securely acquire authorised financial data on behalf of their customers, and to develop new items in personal finance management, wealth management and income verification.This is the type of so-called 'screen scraping' where customer data can be accessed from various financial institutions - and if done at speed and scale across not just bank accounts but other non-financial sources, such as social media sites, it will allow a fuller picture of creditworthiness to be constructed.Over the past couple of days, the news has been trickling out that investments are about to be handed over in an as-yet unspecified seed funding round from NAB Ventures - the venture capital arm of National Australia Bank - and Reinventure, another VC fund that has Westpac as its largest investor.This contradicts the majors' public position, which was to support the concept but be unhelpful in practice over the concept of open source data, according to David Coleman, chair of the house of Reps review of the major banks. This investment gives a clearer indication of where at least two of the major banks really see their future heading.Managing director of NAB Ventures, Todd Forest, said: "The way financial institutions use and share data continues to be an area of focus as banks look for ways to provide improved products and services for their customers."Over a number of years NAB has invested in secure API technology and looked for ways it can be used to deliver improved experiences for our customers by effectively and safely using data."Kara Frederick, a general partner at Westpac's venture capital fund, Reinventure Group, agreed that the current