Comment: Poor data quality is holding back take-up of the Consumer Data Right, a review of the system has found.
The Statutory Review of the Consumer Data Right, conducted by retired senior public servant Elizabeth Kelly, recommended that improvements to CDR functionality and data quality should be the government’s priority, ahead of rolling the system out to other industry sectors.
Kelly cited the submission of the Financial Data and Technology Association, which said many of its members regularly shared concerns about poor quality CDR data, delays in data being received and “missing fields, erroneous data fields, garbled and inconsistent data”.
The review said: “It will take a concerted effort by all participants in the CDR ecosystem to work collectively to resolve data quality issues as they arise.
“Accredited data recipients report feeling that the onus is on them to resolve issues related to the quality of data that have received from data holders, with little action taken by the data holders themselves.
“There is also the perception among ADRs that there is limited follow-up enforcement by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.”
Surprisingly, Kelly recommended that an alternative data harvesting technology, screen scraping, be banned as a way of prompting a more widespread transition to the CDR.
A number of financial services companies have reported to Banking Day that they continue to use screen scraping because it is a more reliable and comprehensive data source than the CDR.
It would be a perverse outcome to ban a technology that works as a way of encouraging businesses to use one that doesn’t work.
Part of Kelly’s rationale is that CDR is a safer way of sharing consumer data that screen scraping but she provides no evidence to back up this claim.
Kelly also recommended that there be greater visibility of system objectives and success measures to provide greater confidence to participants.
And she called for the introduction of an initiative like the UK’s Open UP Challenge, which promotes the development of use cases.