The CSIRO’s Data61 division has released a ‘working draft’ of the standards that will underpin the new Consumer Data Right regime.
Once the CDR regime has begun, a business in a CDR sector will have to make available in a machine-readable format a range of data about a consumer’s use of their services. Consumers will be able to choose to share their data with accredited third parties.
Open banking is the first focus of the CDR, which has yet to be legislated, with the energy and telecommunications sectors also expected to be among the first industries subject to the new obligations.
Under the draft CDR legislation, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) will be charged with drawing up the rules setting out how the CDR applies to a particular sector. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner will oversee privacy complaints relating to CDR data.
Data61 has provisionally been designated as the Data Standards Body and tasked with drawing up the technical standards for the CDR. Andrew Stevens, the former managing director of IBM Australia, has been appointed the DSB interim chair.
Data61’s Consumer Data Standards team has posted a set of draft banking and common APIs on GitHub.
“These standards represent version 0.1.0 of the high level standards which will support the creation of version 1,” Data61 said.
The development of the working draft standards has been guided by four outcome principles — APIs are secure, APIs use open standards, APIs provide a good customer experience, and APIs provide a good developer experience.
In addition, the work adheres to eight technical principles (APIs are RESTful, implementation agnostic, simple, rich in capability, performant, consistent, version controlled and backwards compatible, and extensible).
The draft banking API allows the retrieval of a list of accounts, the balances or transactions for an account or accounts, and the direct debits for an account (or accounts).
The Data61 CDR team is accepting feedback on the draft until 23 November.
The government in its May budget detailed its $65 million, four-year data push. It includes the introduction of the CDR as well as a range of other measures such as new data sharing and release framework to streamline the way government data is made available.
The CDR is part of the of the government’s response to the Productivity Commission inquiry into the availability and use of public and private data by individuals and organisations.