From 30 May, New Zealand’s four major banks - ANZ, ASB, BNZ and Westpac - must offer the secure payment service - although some already have it in place.
It allows customers to give a third party (such as an online retailer) permission to connect to their banking information, meaning there is no need to enter credit or debit card details to make a purchase.
Open banking can be used both on retailers’ websites and on their mobile app, if they have one
Surely you’d want to wait yes? Do you really want corporations scanning your spending habits?
There are two things here. One is online payments, the other is sharing your data. For online payments, this seems to be a better option that Polipay. And most likely more private than using a credit card.
The data sharing is a whole nother kettle of fish though.
Yes, it’s a slippery slope though. “Oh this is so easy” so you use it. That’s step 1. Then “Give us your data for your rewards”. Oh, I love rewards! $10 off my groceries a week. Then “Your insurance just doubled”.
This is the real problem. And this ship has already sailed - google and data brokers are already creepily tracking your every online and offline move and tying them together.
Your financial providers are covered by a much, much more restrictive set of regulations preventing them from screwing you over like that.
Open Banking seems generally aimed at attacking the nasty behaviour banks have been getting away with, where they gatekeep your financial data in order to prevent you from getting any useful utility out of it unless you pay them extortionate fees.
What is to stop you from creating an account that only has a connection to your insurance company…or is this supposed to be we get access to literally all of your accounts and spending habits?
Depends if the insurance company will allow that. I would say they won’t. It’s game over at that point.
They would probably require you provide the account that your salary goes into, then ask for explanations for any money leaving that they can’t categorise.
This is probably similar to asking people to provide 3 months of bank statements, which happens today. I’m not usually a slippery slope kind of guy but making it easy to automatically scan your transactions may well change the industry for the worse. Would be interesting to know how this affected things in Europe, I think it’s been around there a long time.
Europe has GDPR, so you’re not legally allowed to collect data unless it’s necessary for the actual service you’re providing your customer, and you’re not allowed to use data for anything else once you’ve collected it for the purpose you stated.
Having said that, your customer will always have to prove who they are, how they acquired funds, and where funds are going. This is to prevent bribery & corruption, money laundering, terrorist financing, tax evasion etc.
I was working as a software developer for an EU investment bank when the EU implemented GDPR, and the amount of paperwork required to collect and hold personal data meant we destroyed a ton of data & documentation and rewrote a lot of software. And every spreadsheet containing personal data or which was used more than once had to be recorded in an EUC register with signed commitments about GDPR compliance. Even if data wasn’t strictly forbidden by GDPR we’d be very wary asking for any information which could theoretically be misused to discriminate against protected classes.
The NZ Privacy Act 2020 looks broadly similar in intent to the GDPR, so I imagine there’d be the same disinclination to collect information which can’t be proven necessary to perform the requested service or satisfy regulatory requirements.
I have several NZ insurance policies and they had no interest in transaction history. Same with my mortgage. I sent bank statements, but only as proof of address.
Only my credit card application wanted to drill into my spending, which is not unexpected considering it’s unsecured lending. For sure I’d rather approve the API access than try to find where I can download (& probably pay extortionate fees) for copies of historic statements
It is similar. Not sure about GDPR but in NZ, you can only use data for what it’s collected for but you just ask for consent at the point of collection, and state your intent as using the information to assess suitability for insurance (or whatever), then you have met the requirements.
I think the idea is in future you could get cheaper life or health insurance if you agree to let the insurance company scan your records to check how much fast food you eat or whatever. It’s not feasible today as you’d have to have staff processing it which negates the cost saving, but in a future world maybe it could be a thing.
For mortgages, they definitely check your bank statements after the new rules against loan sharks came in (a couple of years ago), but if you are borrowing from a bank you’re with then they aready have that info.
I think life insurance is already pretty grabby with data, behind the scenes. We had a ton of data on some high value life policies we’d bought - down to records of all doctors visits. And even for lower value policies they can currently just ask you the important actuarial questions (e.g. are you a poor obese guy who smokes, rides a motorcycle & lives alone) and then deny the payout if you lied.
Given how disgustingly evil the US health insurance system is, my hope is that NZ resists the temptation to go there. I don’t have health insurance since moving back to NZ and it’s been fine. All the things I was told by the doctor “go private or the wait will be too long” turned out to have reasonable waits after all.
I’d agree about waiting personally. Not to defend it of course, but isn’t this already happening? Probably not at the banking side other than for their internal benefit (I presume as they’re fairly regulated) , but at the retail , POS , even accounting system sides? Theres also all other data collection and harvesting sources - internet use basically, location data etc - but thats all known. This is likely to be a more consolidated competitor in that space I guess. All speculation. I’m more curious so fishing for knowledge
I am in some of the industries you mentioned, and no, it’s not common. Not yet anyway, but some unscrupolous actors would love to get that ride going. People need to push back, or we will be so far under the thumb, we won’t be able to breathe.