NAB welcomes the Government’s direction in relation to screen scraping practices and the movement towards safer alternatives.

NAB’s Executive for Innovation and Partnerships, Brad Carr said “there is broad consensus that screen scraping is suboptimal. We need viable alternatives so we can progress the transition away from screen scraping practices and this is a sentiment that NAB shares to keep our customers safe and their data secure.”

“Screen scraping is often touted as the main competitor to safer alternatives such as secure data sharing through the Consumer Data Right (CDR), so we need policies to make the CDR a more compelling alternative to the practice of screen scraping.

“NAB welcomes the Government’s positive steps towards this goal, including recent consultations to simplify the consent frameworks for the CDR to remove unnecessary friction for consumers, which may undermine its adoption.

“We encourage continued focused reform of the CDR so that it can achieve its aims of enhancing competition and consumer choice. For more CDR-powered products and services to be created by participants in the CDR ecosystem, we need to ensure that the CDR framework supports such innovation,” Mr Carr said.

NAB is an active participant in the Government’s consultation processes on regulatory reform of the CDR and advocates for targeted changes to the regime. This would make the CDR a more viable framework that supports innovation and creation of products and services by Accredited Data Recipients, which ultimately will accelerate adoption of the CDR and replace less safe data capture practices, such as screen scraping.

NAB welcomes changes to the CDR which would make it simpler and more accessible for individuals and businesses alike and NAB has previously pointed to aspects of the CDR regulatory framework, where we consider reform is necessary to achieve this objective, such as having a clear boundary for the definition of CDR-derived data.

A simpler and more accessible CDR would be a desirable precursor to expanding the data sets (and as a consequence, the use cases) accessible within the CDR, which would encourage more consumers to engage in safe data sharing within the CDR regime.

NAB welcomes the move away from screen scraping as a data capture practice and encourages continued focused reform of the CDR framework so more Australians can take the benefits the regime has to offer.