Being able to access and share high-quality financial data is what today’s digital-savvy business customers want. But until now, financial software vendors have had to rely on workarounds to get access to banking and other important financial information.
With the arrival of the Consumer Data Right, easily getting access to your customer’s financial information has come a step closer.
Let’s take a look at:
- What CDR delivers for consumers, businesses and software vendors
- The benefits of this new Open Banking regime for software providers
- How ACSISS helps you take data sharing to a new level
What CDR delivers for consumers, businesses and software vendors
The Consumer Data Right (CDR) legislation was first introduced in Australia in 2019. The CDR is part of a global movement known as Open Banking, which aims to make it easier for consumers to access and share their own financial data with trusted third parties. The CDR gives consumers the right to share their data between the authorised service providers they choose, making it easier for accountants, financial advisers and software vendors to make use of this data.
As of May 2023, the banking, energy and non-bank lending sectors have been included in the CDR legislation. This means banking customers can now share details of their current and savings accounts, loan accounts, interest and other details of their financial transactions.
Being able to pull this financial data into your software platform has a number of benefits, both for your customers and for the functionality and value of your software service.
The benefits of this new Open Banking regime for software providers
As a consumer or business, getting financial data into a third-party software solution has never been as easy as it should be. Historically, it meant downloading old-fashioned .CSV files from your internet banking and uploading these files into your software. Or, in a worst-case scenario, having to manually input all the information line by line, transaction by transaction.
Then came direct bank feeds – a way to connect your bank accounts directly to your financial software. The downside was that only limited banks/account types were available.
In order to expand the range of data available, many software platforms started to use screen-scraping technology, however this requires account holders to share sensitive password information with screen-scraping providers
The banks disliked this breach of security protocol and vendors were unhappy with the potential risks. Now, with the advent of CDR and Open Banking, a better, more secure solution for data sharing is available.
Enabling your software platform to receive data from your customers’ banks via CDR provides several key benefits:
- Efficient and streamlined data access – under the CDR legislation, your software platform can make use of Open Banking to quickly get access to your customers’ banking data. This eliminates the need for manual data-entry or complex, time-consuming and costly data-integration processes.
- Elimination of screen-scraping risks – Open Banking ends your reliance on screen-scraping technology, which is prone to security risks and data inaccuracies. By accessing data from banks via authorised CDR channels, you can be sure of the integrity and reliability of the financial information you’re providing to customers.
- Enhanced security and privacy – your customers no longer need to share their banking usernames and passwords with you or any third parties. Instead, the CDR framework allows for secure and consent-based sharing of data. This protects your customers’ sensitive information and reduces the risk of unauthorised access or data breaches.
- Improved data quality – CDR regulations ensure more standardised and structured banking data, so the information you receive is more accurate and consistent. This improves the reliability of financial reporting, analysis and decision-making for your software users, and cuts down on errors.
- Empowered financial data ownership – Open Banking and the CDR legislation increase your customers’ access to their own financial data. By granting permission to financial software vendors, customers can easily view and analyse their banking information within their preferred software. This makes it easier for you to offer improved insights into their financial health and overall financial management.
How ACSISS helps you take data sharing to a new level
Making it easier to access your customers’ financial data, without all the drawbacks of screen-scraping and password-sharing is a massive opportunity for your software business.
ACSISS by SISS Data Services is an Accredited Data Recipients (ADR) for CDR, making ACSISS ideally placed to help you make the most of Open Banking.
ACSISS overcomes the problems associated with data feeds powered by screen-scraping. Only ACSISS uses both Closed Banking (Direct Bank Feeds) and Open Banking (CDR) to provide the most secure, most reliable and most comprehensive bank data feed service available.
- Connect customers bank accounts directly to your software platform – ACSISS Platform provides access to Direct Feeds and Open Banking data via our customer API, allowing your customers to share whatever data they want with your platform.
- Develop to our REST API and integrate into your platform – you can build to the ACSISS Platform via our REST API, allowing you to build Open Banking data access into your platform at ground level.
- Offer enhanced value to your customer – with an ACSISS integration, your customers get deeper access to their financial information, and you can offer better insights into their financial management, all powered by the customer’s own banking data and other financial transaction records.
Get in touch to see how ACSISS opens up a whole new world of Open Banking.