The Consumer Data Right – Sectoral Assessment for Non-Bank Lending – Final Report has concluded that the scope of the Consumer Data Right (CDR) should expand to non-bank lending with merchant acquiring services, general insurance and superannuation sectors to be progressively phased in.

The data to be shared will exclude materially enhanced data.

Who will it apply to? While Open Banking identified Authorised Deposit-taking Institutions as data holders, there is currently no such equivalent for non-bank lenders that neatly captures the relevant entities. It has been decided to apply the right to consumer data held by “registrable corporations” as defined in section 7 of the Financial Sector (Collection of Data) Act 2001. This includes non-bank lenders with a loan book in excess of $50m.

The draft Consumer Data Right – Non-Bank Lending draft designation instrument is intended to be broad in order to capture all the entities that are providing finance, or ‘credit-like’ products. Specifically, the designation is intended to capture providers of products generally known as Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL).

The current CDR rules do not mandate the sharing of data about BNPL products, meaning banks are not able to share information about these products. However, if non-bank lender data holders were mandated to share this data Treasury recommends the rules applying to ADIs should also be amended to include this as a mandatory dataset for sharing. This would ensure consistent treatment between banks and non-banks for BNPL data.

Separately, for the avoidance of doubt, the Consumer Data Right – Open Banking sectoral assessment draft designation instrument will update the definition of ‘product’ in the banks’ designation to explicitly capture the full range of lease products offered by banks (irrespective of how these products are structured), including consumer leases, asset finance, and hire purchase.

Powers of attorney and the Consumer Data Right
The ACCC has published a document that provides guidance to data holders about matters to consider when assessing the interaction between powers of attorney and the CDR.

In general, where the CDR Rules require something to be provided to a CDR consumer, the same thing could be provided to the attorney acting on behalf of the CDR consumer (in addition to the CDR consumer), where this is within the attorney’s authority.

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