The Treasury Laws Amendment (Consumer Data Right) Bill 2019 has been re-introduced into the House of Representatives after it lapsed before the election. If passed, it will amend the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, the Privacy Act 1988, and the Australian Information Commissioner Act 2010 to introduce a consumer data right. Background.
UPDATE: Consumer Data Right Bill passed.
The CDR provides individuals with a right to efficiently and conveniently access information held by businesses about the transactions they enter into as consumers and to authorise secure access to this data by trusted and accredited third parties.
Individuals will not be obliged to consent to the use of their data.
The CDR will also require businesses to provide public access to information on specified products they have on offer.
The Government has committed to applying the CDR to the banking, energy and telecommunications sectors, and eventually across the economy. The CDR relating to banking data is commonly referred to as “Open Banking”.
Open Banking trial
The CSIRO Data Standard Body has released details of bank preparation for Open Banking
Three banks, ANZ, The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and Westpac have now publicly released their Product Reference Data through application programming interfaces (APIs) encompassing the initial four product categories covered by the Consumer Data Right (CDR) regime. This is a voluntary release by the banks whilst legislation is considered by Parliament.
The product categories covered include transaction accounts, term deposits, credit card accounts and debit card accounts.
The Product Reference Data covered is general product data and does not include any personal customer information. Specific customer information will only ever be transferred under the CDR regime with the explicit consent of customers and only to ACCC accredited third parties.
A final draft of the consumer data standards has been released, subject to any legislative changes, suitable for pilot testing of the initial Consumer Data Right (CDR) implementation.
