Archive:February 9, 2018

By Jim Bulling and Edwin Tan

The Australian Government has today released a report into Open Banking in Australia that sets out recommendations in relation to the method of implementation and proposed timelines.  Some key points are:

• the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) should be primarily responsible for overseeing standards-setting and accreditation, assisted by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner for privacy issues;
• the obligation to share data should apply to all Australian Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) as well as reciprocally for other participating entities;
• all ADIs should be automatically accredited to receive data.  A risk-based accreditation standard should be used for non-ADIs (this would include most FinTech startups, for example);
• the use of Application Programming Interfaces to facilitate data sharing; and
• mandatory implementation of “read-only” access should be approximately 12 months from a final Government decision to implement Open Banking for the big 4 banks, with a further 12 months transitory period for other banks.

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