Open banking: Finder seeks share of ‘internet of financial data’

Comparison deals provider Finder has sought regulated access to consumer open banking information with founder Fred Schebesta saying the system is “creating an internet of financial data”.

Finder co-founder Fred Schebesta.

Comparison deals provider Finder says it is gearing up for new-age consumer shopping behaviour where open banking data will be ‘table stakes’.

The Australian-headquartered international business, co-founded by Fred Schebesta and Frank Restuccia, has sought accreditation from the ACCC to be an Open Banking data recipient under new Consumer Data Right (CDR) rules.

Australia’s open banking system, in development since late 2017, is aimed at giving consumers more access to and control over their personal data.

At this stage, it is a read-only system that allows data holders like banks to share account and transaction information by customer consent to data recipients, mostly third-party financial products and services providers, in a regulated, safe manner.

For Finder, it means access to quicker, more updated information, so it can “customise” partner offers for users.

It will also continue to use screen scraping, which usually involves customers handing over account access information to external parties, to generate custom offers.

“This is good, but it’s what next, the write-access, which will help everyone to get to the next phase where choice is enabled at the click of a button,” Mr Schebesta said.

In the UK for instance open banking systems have evolved to allow third-party service providers to transact on behalf of consumers.

Finder co-founder Fred Schebesta.

Hive Empire, trading as Finder - one of the nation’s largest comparison sites with 135,000 website members and 200,000 users of its 2020-launched app - is excited by these future opportunities.

“We are the user case to open banking.

“The government wanted to create this switching mindset that people should look at their products and start to switch them.

“Banks could have done this from the beginning … they could have told you to switch a product and that you are paying too much on all sort of things, they already have open banking because they have the customers, but they just don't have an incentive to do it.

“We sit in the middle place, that aggregator spot, where we don’t mind the outcome as long as you get into a better position.

“It’s a real moment in time where things are changing,” Mr Schebesta said.

The government’s involvement would probably help more customers to build trust, which could be an ‘inflection point’ for the fintech industry.

Currently 30 per cent of Finder visitors ‘drop off’ because they are hesitant to share personal information, he said.

Mr Schebesta, who also was part of the advisory committee on CDR rules, has discussed some of his ambitious plans at the prerecorded virtual Fintech Summit, starting on Tuesday.

Finder launched its first mobile application, the Finder app, powered by Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) option in the midst of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Andrew Boyd, head of digital native business, at AWS ANZ.

EC2 provides Finder with a secure, resizeable compute capacity in the cloud, constantly scan the market for better products and offerings, such as rates for home loans or savings accounts. To date, the app has been downloaded more than 122,000 times, and generated more than 45,000 savings insights to help consumers make better financial decisions.

“Finder was born online, and it’s been an exciting journey watching them grow from an innovative start-up, to Australia’s most visited comparison site, and now to a multinational company servicing millions of people worldwide,” said Andrew Boyd, head of digital native business at AWS ANZ.

“Finder’s cloud-first approach demonstrates how ambitious start-ups can take advantage of the expansive global AWS footprint to seize new market opportunities around the world, and we look forward to working with them to support this continued growth,” he said.

“The pandemic has really changed the way that people around the world live and work. One of the interesting things that we saw in statistics is for the first time in 2020 more than 57 per cent of consumers, for example, had their preference to use online banking.

“Australia is now recognised on the global stage, really, for its ability to build fantastic fintech businesses, the likes of Afterpay going global have really cemented that.

“But you’re also seeing a community that is building and continuing to generate those new ideas as well. And I think that’s actually just been accelerated by COVID.”

An ACCC spokesman said he could not comment on accreditation applications.