A crowd of industry veterans, enthusiasts, practitioners and optimists gathered last night at King Wood Mallesons Sydney office to hear from the respective ‘Godfathers’ of Open Banking in both the United Kingdom and Australia - Dr Bill Roberts and Dr Scott Farrell.
I was there with a dual interest - wearing both my Wych and MogoPlus.ai hats; switch-hitting like Mickey Mantle in his prime.
The last time I was in these hallowed halls was back in early 2017 as part of a Fintech Australia delegation, meeting with Dr Farrell prior to the publication of ‘The Farrell Report’ which paved the way for what we now know, here in Australia, as ‘The Consumer Data Right.’
Masterfully moderated by Hannah Glass, the conversation weaved its way through the genesis story of each regime (‘Open Banking’ in the UK and the ‘Consumer Data Right’ (CDR) in Australia), the pitfalls and lessons learned in each country’s roll-out and some of the success stories achieved thus far.
Key differences between the two countries, for those new to the topic, include:
Open Banking payments (or “action initiation”) were included from the get-go in the UK
The UK regime scope was limited to banking-only
The Australian initiative featured banking data initially but also a broader “Open Data” approach - including energy, finance, telco data
Screen-scraping (or ‘electronic data capture’) being quickly outlawed in the UK whereas not yet in Australia, meaning we’re running two data sharing mechanisms
It seemed from the conversation that adoption has been speedier in the UK with Dr Roberts reporting that circa 10m consumers have shared their data via open Banking there, and Open Banking payments (or action initiations) have recently surpassed information requests in terms of volumes.
Dr Roberts expressed a modicum of bewilderment at the (un)healthy tension that seems to exist in Australia between key ecosystem participants, namely banks and Fintechs. The inference I took from this is that either the regulators have wielded a heavier hand over there (the UK), or the banks have wielded less power to apply a handbrake to the regime.
The move towards Open Banking / Open Data is truly a global thematic with 95 countries now participating or working towards some kind of data sharing system. India was identified as leading the way in payments, whilst Brazil, not the first time, was held up as a paragon of Open Banking virtue (or speed & success, to be more precise).
Scott Farrell summed up the rollout in Australia as generally positive, but queried a lack of ongoing investment and support from those who have already invested substantial amounts to fulfil their CDR compliance obligations (I took this to mean the banking sector in general but I may be wrong).
Clearly, much progress has been made but, equally clearly, there is much more to be done to achieve the objectives both of the ‘Godfathers’ of Open Banking intended.
