Scott Farrell, in a keynote address to FinTech Australia's CDR Summit, suggested that it was time to "take the Consumer Data Right to the next level, beyond operation, to performance of its objectives".
He explained the phases briefly: "[The CDR] design phase started in 2017 with the initial recommendations for implementation, its development phase in 2019 when they first became law, and its operational phase in 2020, when the first customer account data sharing was enabled," Farrell said.
"Well, in my view, the next level is performance and it is reached it when the operation of the CDR achieves its objectives and the outcomes for which it was designed."
He stressed that Consumer Data Right means "sharing customer data as the customer directs, for use as the customer desires".
"The customer is the object and not the subject of the CDR," Farrell explained.
"Through its system of rules and technology, the CDR empowers customers to share their data if they choose, provides the means for them to do so, and holds the recipients accountable to the customer for the use of those data."
He further clarified that the focus of CDR is sharing customer data, not money. "Whilst payments can be part of action initiation, the CDR is more of a payment system for data, than a data add-on to our payment systems," Farrell said.
He cited a report last year from the UK's Joint Regulatory Oversight Committee: "Success will be measured through greater innovation, lower prices or costs and improved quality of services through competitive pressure being exerted across the sector."
Farrell also cited other examples from New Zealand, Canada and the US where data sharing legislation is being introduced with stated outcomes that include “supercharging” competition, improving financial products and services and discouraging “junk fees”.
These comments may well have been a subtle swipe at the ABA, which published research it had commissioned from Accenture ahead of the CDR Summit showing an extremely low take-up by banking customers, despite an estimated $1.5 billion investment by the ABA membership.
In what had become a day for reports into CDR being released, Damir Cucic, CEO and founder of Basiq, presented his case for continuing to expand data sharing systems – based on analysis of data processing through his company's aggregation platform.
He warned though there need to be nuances in how data is being used: "Businesses have had plenty of time to work out how web scraping works for them," Cucic said.
This is one of the frictions that has slowed down adoption of CDR.
According to the Basiq report, though, connection data from the company's platform shows CDR’s popularity is steadily increasing, challenging the perception that growth has been slow and uptake minimal. Between October 2022 and March 2024, Open Banking experienced a 30 per cent compounded growth rate, increasing from 10,400 connections to 777,000.
CDR is growing at the rate of 6 per cent per month, and he estimated that CDR will account for all traffic by 2026.
Cucic then targeted the assumption that CDR’s lengthy connection process increases consumer drop-off. "We’ve found that Open Banking achieves almost double the success rate of web scraping, with 80 per cent of connections successful compared to 42 per cent for web scraping," he said.
"Forgotten login credentials, anti-scraping measures, and maintenance affect connection success for web scraping, while Open Banking issues include login ID problems, poor banking flows, API outages, and fraud prevention," the Basiq report added.