The ACCC has announced that Bank of Queensland Ltd has paid a penalty of $133,200 after the ACCC issued it with an infringement notice for allegedly breaching Rule 1.13(1)(b) of the Competition and Consumer (Consumer Data Right) Rules 2020 by failing to provide a service enabling consumers’ data to be shared.

Under the CDR rules, Bank of Queensland as a non-major ADI was required to be in a position to share data for financial products, including savings accounts, term deposits and credit cards, by 1 July 2021.

Background.

The ACCC alleges that Bank of Queensland did not meet this obligation on 1 July 2021 as required.

The ACCC says that Bank of Queensland did not make the required services available until 13 December 2021, which meant that the bank’s customers were unable to share their CDR data for more than five months after the date by which this service was required to be available to them.

The Bank said that the delay was largely due to the complexity of adapting BOQ source systems to the Open Banking requirements and third-party testing issues.

The payment of a penalty specified in an infringement notice is not an admission of a contravention of the CDR Rules. The ACCC can issue an infringement notice when it has reasonable grounds to believe a person or business has contravened certain provisions in the CDR Rules.

This is the first infringement notice the ACCC has issued for an alleged breach of the CDR Rules.

The ACCC says that a number of banks were delayed in implementing their CDR solutions, in part due to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic and a shortage of skilled IT resources. In deciding to issue an infringement notice to Bank of Queensland, the ACCC took into account a number of factors, including the period of alleged non-compliance, the number of customers potentially impacted, the resourcing constraints Bank of Queensland faced in developing its CDR infrastructure and the steps it took to limit the duration of its non-compliance.

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