What is 'open banking'?

Open banking is all about customer choice. It will be up to you who you share your personal banking information with.?It works like this.

You have control over your banking information and will be able to securely share this information with what we call ‘third parties’ such as financial technology companies (fintechs) or a utility company like a telco or power company.

Open banking gives you the ability - if you choose to - to pay for items on a third party’s website or app directly from your bank account. Or you can share your personal banking information to get customised services – like budgeting advice or options for different savings accounts.

This requires safe and secure sharing of personal banking information between your bank and a third party. The secure sharing of the information is done through APIs – application programming interfaces.? APIs allow different pieces of software to talk to each other.

When you agree to a request – say from a utilities company or a budgeting advice app asking access your personal banking information – they can initiate a payment or access your banking information to provide budgeting advice via their app.

Despite what the name might suggest it’s not about making all of a customer’s financial information open to anyone who wants to see or use it.

Each customer will decide which third parties can access their information, and which information they’re comfortable sharing. And if they change their mind, they can stop sharing the information at any time.

Along with other banks ANZ committed to begin working with third parties so customers can make payments from May 2024 and then share their account data with other parties from November of this year.

A lot of this is already happening, you probably just don’t realise it is open banking.

ANZ has made significant investment in open banking and the technology gives us the ability to offer new services and products to our customers.

Since 2022, ANZ customers have been able to use Worldline’s Online EFTPOS open banking payment service to pay for things online, straight from their bank account. We call this a Payment Request.

Customers use their mobile number and the ANZ goMoney app at checkout, doing away with the need for a credit or debit card.

More than 120,000 customers have authorised a payment request.

Most recently we signed an agreement with BlinkPay and are looking to add more approved third-party payment services soon.

We’ve also collaborated with Spark NZ to provide customers with a billing feature, called View Bills. Once a customer agrees to use the service their Spark bills are shown in the goMoney app allowing them to see how much is due and when.

The feature also ensures payment details are correct and removes the need for customers to hunt out details like account numbers and references from other apps or emails, which can cause errors.

Keeping our customers’ accounts safe and secure, preventing fraud and other financial crimes, and enhancing customer protection are a top priority for ANZ.

We take our responsibility to protect customer privacy and data seriously.

Third parties must align with our expectation to provide good customer outcomes and have robust customer and data protection protocols in place.

We know many of our customers are hesitant about sharing their data and rightly expect ANZ to protect their personal information. We’ll continue to carefully consider which third parties we offer open banking services to.

As open banking develops it is critical that we continue to balance the launch of new services and seamless customer experiences with the necessary protections that will create and sustain customer trust.

We are committed to continued investment in data security and educating our customers, so they are making informed decisions on how they use and share their data, while also remaining in control.