Consumer Data Right (Open Banking)

What is the Consumer Data Right?

The Consumer Data Right (CDR) is an Australian data-sharing law, jointly overseen by the ACCC and the OAIC. It gives consumers and businesses the right to authorise sharing their own data, held by banks and other providers, with accredited third parties. In the banking sector this is called open banking, and it lets a customer permit an accredited recipient to access account and transaction data through secure, regulated channels rather than by handing over login credentials.

A concrete example: a customer applying for finance can consent, under CDR, to their bank sharing account and transaction history with an accredited lender, so the lender can assess the application using verified data straight from the source instead of uploaded PDF statements.

Why it matters for Australian finance teams

CDR and open banking are reshaping how identity, income, and account information can be verified in Australia, using consented, source-of-truth data under a strong privacy regime tied to the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles. For finance and lending teams it promises faster onboarding and richer verification. It is a data-access framework, though, not a payments rail and not by itself a fraud control, so how the shared data is used still determines the outcome.

How ezyshield helps

ezyshield is not an accredited CDR data recipient and does not provide open banking data-sharing; that requires ACCC accreditation and is a different function. What ezyshield does is verify, before money moves, that the person and business are genuine, via ABN and ASIC records, and that they own the nominated bank account, re-verifying whenever details change. Every check is written to an append-only audit trail that is logged and never edited or deleted. See how it works and our guide to bank account ownership verification.