Hit The Restart Button To Save Thousands Of Dollars

Easier access to personal banking and mortgage data will help more people choose the products that best suit their needs

- Michelle Baltazar

It’s that time of the year again. A fresh start. Say goodbye to your financial mistakes from 2019 and start anew. The good news is that there are big changes happening in the banking sector from 2020 that will make it worth resetting your finances. Here are five ways you can ring in the savings.

Screen scraping versus open banking

Mark your calendar. From February, the big four banks will have no choice but to provide their banking customer data digitally to their competitors, once their customer requests they do so.

The key word here is “digitally”. Part of the reason most people don’t switch home loan providers for the lifetime of their loan is that it used to be a cumbersome and manual process.

In recent years, some technology companies have gotten around this through screen scraping. They basically do all the hard work by gathering the data themselves to make the assessment. The catch is that you have to give them your online banking log-in details, which can be risky.

“It is an unsecure way of providing data,” says Paul Wiebusch, partner, open data and open banking lead at Deloitte.

So far, only 8% of the Australian population, mostly millennials and post-millennials, have used apps and finance institutions that use screen scraping.