Open banking solutions for Australia

While the European Union has already implemented open banking regulations to move towards a digital economy, Australia is second in the lead in adopting open banking. In August 2019, the Australian government passed the consumer data rights (CDR) legislation, to provide voluntary options for banking customers to decide what data they want to share with third-party providers (TPPs). This will, in turn, lead to, development of new products and services, and better customer experience.

The open banking model will not only help customers with seamless, value-added, and wider variety of banking services but also support entrepreneurs and businesses to deliver better services. As a result, consumers will be able to:

• Track their expenditures across banks and plan better to meet the savings goals
• Compare mortgages and choose the most suitable option
• Analyze expenses in electricity usage and plan accordingly to save on energy bills
• Determine phone bill expenses and choose the most appropriate plan
• Choose the most convenient credit card based on needs

Open banking is more than compliance, and banks and financial institutions need to monetize their open banking APIs for long-term success.

How can Virtusa help?

Virtusa’s CDR Solution helps banks to not only accelerate regulatory compliance but also easily innovate, compete, and monetize the opportunities with open banking.

Built around API security and access and consent management, Virtusa’s CDR solution opens the door for collaboration with FinTechs across Australia and helps design open applications as per the common data standards (CDS). The solution helps in the following ways:

• Enables banks to expose CDR-compliant APIs for products, transactions, and customer data
• Enables accredited data recipients /TPPs products targeted for the Australian market to be compatible with the bank APIs
• Ensures that APIs conform to CDR standards around data sharing & consent management as applicable in Australia
• Enables customers to use accredited data recipients/TPPs to access their account data and personal data

Virtusa’s CDR solution comes bundled with several out-of-the-box features:

• Developer portal that is purpose-built for rapid experimentation and new product development
• Consent management workflows and dashboards
• Token life cycle management
• ACCC regulatory reporting data, audit logs, and monitoring

We can implement the CDS requirements in phases – PRD requirements (2-3 months) followed by customer data requirements in subsequent phases (3-4 months). The solution is containerized and can be quickly deployed on the cloud or on-premise. We leverage several accelerators and decades of system integration experience to seamlessly integrate the solution into the bank’s core banking, credit cards, and digital platforms. In addition, the solution can be extended for data ingestion and innovation. The extension provides access to 12,000+ FinTechs, an integrated development environment, synthetic databases to experiment and create new digital native services and products for the open banking ecosystem.

Virtusa’s solution already powers some of the biggest UK and European banks in their CMA9 and PSD2 compliance initiatives. It also powers the Emirates NBD’s Open Banking Sandbox,  Banking Industry Architecture Network’s (BIAN) digital API exchange, and the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network’s APIX platform – the world’s first cross-border, open-architecture platform for Financial Institutions and FinTechs.

To know more about how CDR is the cornerstone of Australia’s open banking initiative and how banks can unlock new revenue streams in Australia, read our comprehensive FAQs.