Open Banking in Australia

I’d just like to scribble out my outrage on this topic.

In Australia, there is a new(ish) Open Banking Project which via the CDR (Consumer Data Right), is intended to empower customers.

Instead, what has happened is that the little guy is once again being fucked.

The approved Third Party Vendors must be ACCC compliant which costs lots of money. This cost is then paid by giants such as Basiq, Adatree, Skript.

Ultimately, the consumer is not able to access their own data because of the scam. They hide true pricings behind grey text on white backgrounds labelled “platform fee”, and any attempt to discover the true pricing is met with “Contact Us”, “Leave a Message” or “Contact Sales”.

resolution#

Up, by Bendigo bank has an excellent API that allows customers to access their transactional information, but the rest of the Big Banks (whilst they have conformed to the Open Banking Policy), only provide their details to other giants which hide our information.

The only real figure I have found was from Skript, who even then charge $99/month for access to 5 bank accounts.

To some extent this does make sense since they would have incurred many costs to become approved, but even now $100/month is too extreme.

I have resuscitated my Wise account and ordered the debit card from them. This coupled with my Up account should be sufficient to track purchases for the foreseeable future.

prospects#

I worry deeply about the scaling of this project. I am young and un-employed presently, but eventually a home-loan will be required and also the share-market equities will need to be tracked ¹.

My Commbank account is now a decade old, and whilst I would not want to abandon it entirely (for the sake of a home-loan) / reliability of receiving payments via commbank in Aus, I at the same time am pissed off that I would need to pay $100/month to track my spending.