At the Fintech Data Horizons Summit in Sydney on Friday, 8 May 2026, speakers from across Open Banking, Open Energy and digital identity came together to explore “fintech for good”.
The central focus of those conversations was Australia’s Consumer Data Right (CDR).
CDR’s architect, Dr Scott Farrell, who is chair of the Data Standards Body, took to the stage alongside Dr Ian Oppermann from the Australian Competition Commission (ACCC) and Nu Nu Win from the Commonwealth Treasury to have a compelling conversation with FinTech Australia’s chief executive officer Rehan D’Almeida.
Farrell is considered the “godfather” of CDR, having published his seminal report in December 2017, which outlined an economy-wide right for consented and secure data sharing, starting with banking.
The ACCC is CDR’s regulator and Treasury advises the relevant minister.
CDR currently has 1.2 million active users, and AI is bringing a “new urgency”
D’Almeida opened the event with an acknowledgment of the accelerated adoption of Open Banking in the past 12 months, with the official CDR performance dashboard statistics sitting at 1.2 million currently active users, and a report by Lateral Economics projecting 18 million users by 2035.
He noted the conversation around safe data sharing has a “new urgency” given the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the “unforeseeable consequences” of bad actors gaining access to data via less safe methods, such as manual uploads and screen scraping.
In Australia, CDR is currently live in Open Banking and Open Energy. It will extend to non-bank lending (Open Finance) from the second half of 2026 onwards. Thereafter, the next sector for inclusion could be government data, specifically income tax information.
Win observed the year-on-year increase in consumers served, noting the growth trajectory, and momentum moving beyond problems to opportunities.
Oppermann said “we are getting to an optimisation phase” having “turned a very substantial corner” and “hit an inflection point”.
He called CDR a “population-level, economy-wide productivity enhancer”.
Farrell – who is known for his colourful analogies involving the beach and the bush – introduced a new surfing narrative, saying “we are now on the big boards”.
A “Team Australia” moment is needed to update risk appetite for screen scraping
Oppermann commented on the barriers to Open Banking, saying screen scraping “can still be easier” than complying with the CDR Rules, which introduce “downside risk”.
He advocated for organisations to change their willingness to participate in screen scraping.
Farrell said the next five years are going to bring new risks, such as the combination of AI plus screen scraping, and urged the audience to have a “Team Australia” moment and think about where we want to be in 10 years’ time.
“What does industry believe its standard should be?” Farrell asked.
Agentic AI can inform action initiation, but we must build for humans
The Australian parliament passed action initiation legislation in 2023.
This established the legal framework. However, no actions have yet been designated by the minister to permit CDR to move beyond read-only data sharing, nor have any relevant regulations or technical standards been developed.
Account switching is the most likely first use case, although payments have also been referenced.
Oppermann pointed to agentic AI, saying it can help to shape the thinking about action initiation, and whether delegation of authority can be harmful.
Farrell emphasised the importance of building for humans, not machines, and underlined that the “old thinking” is still a good approach because CDR requires people to have trust.
“Strict deterministic consent flow won’t work,” he said. “It will need an overlay.”
CDR, digital identity, and payments are converging
Farrell noted that CDR, digital identity, and payments are converging.
“Those three layers have to come together,” he said.
“So what’s the vision?” he queried, saying there is a need to determine “standards,” whether strict rules or more flexible guidelines, and his preference is for guidelines.
“You don’t need the same rulebook for each,” he said.
“But if we are going to have the same competitors, it has to work together and produce positive outcomes, so we need a vision of where we are getting to,” he continued.
The panel noted the participation of approximately 90 countries globally in local Open Banking regimes and praised the development of digital infrastructure that can support information flows.
Jennifer Harrison is director, startups and scaleups at Reputation Edge
Further reading: Australian mutual banks favour fintech partnerships for Open Banking data access
