Emma Gray, ANZ's chief data officer, moderating the stakeholder panel at the Australian Bankers Association's Open Data Symposium, opened the discussion on the benefits and risks for 'stakeholders' posed by the future implementation of a yet-to-be-drafted open data regime for Australian banks and fintechs.For Gray, the initial risk lies in the serious lack of planning: "This is an unusual situation where we are pushing into innovation [in the consumer retail space] before we are absolutely clear on the customer use case," Gray said."Most of the time one starts with a really deep understanding of customer needs and behaviours and then innovate based on that. Erin Turner, head of campaigns for Choice, said she was "heartened" to hear that consumers were being considered in planning, but remained sceptical: "To have a really frank discussion that leads to real solutions we need to recognise the commercial interests that all parties have in this debate and to name them". "Otherwise we'll end up with a distorted system that calls a result 'a consumer outcome' when it might actually be a commercial outcome""When we look at basic banking problems, we're quite worried that most consumers are paying for products with some of the higher fees and higher interest rates in the market - for example credit cards.""And people aren't switching - that is really a by-product in the market. What we are hoping for is institutions to stop competing on interest rates and to start competing on fees."