Westpac is reassessing how much data is held data following the Optus, Medibank and Latitude data breaches over the past six months, Westpac fraud head Ben Young says.

Young said that Westpac would prefer to hold tokenised versions of identity data – the digital representation of real assets.

“Even banks would prefer to hold tokenised versions of identity data at this point. I think if regulation allowed us to do that, we would prefer not to hold the [real] document for those reasons,” he told the Australian Financial Review Business Summit.

He said the most preferable outcome for holding data was for the identity owner to know where and how their data was used, rather than a bank holding all responsibility on where identity data is being used.