Four years into Australia’s Consumer Data Right, we’ve arrived at an inflection point. Despite the banking sector rollout being completed, covering 99% of consumer deposits, and 175+ businesses registered to use Open Banking data, major use cases remain absent.
One obstacle is the prevalence of screen-scraping, the entrenched and unregulated alternative to Open Banking.
Due to screen-scraping’s security and privacy issues, banning this practice is now being considered by the government.
But can Open Banking deliver as a replacement?
Our latest study compares Open Banking and screen scraping, analysing millions of transactions and consents. The results show that Open Banking outperforms screen scraping in several important areas.
The results: Open Banking vs screen scraping
Consent Conversion
We’ve compared the conversion rate for the consent process between screen scraping and Open Banking data based on actual user data on our platform.
In this comparison, we review the consent process in two parts:
- App side consent – Providing data sharing consent in the app
- Bank side consent – Completing the consent process with the bank
Open Banking shows higher success rates in obtaining user consent:
| App side conversion | Bank side conversion | End-to-end conversion | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Banking | 93% | 88% | 81% |
| Screen scraping | 84% | 59% | 50% |
Reliability
Once the data-sharing consent is established, Open Banking proves much more reliable. Due to security measures by banks, screen scraping is often unable to maintain a data-sharing connection. This results in 22% of all data syncing attempts failing. Open Banking only has these issues with 0.5% of data syncing attempts.
Data Quality and Availability
Open Banking provides access to more data points and cleaner data, resulting in better transaction enrichment and deeper financial insights.
- Compared to screen scraping, Open Banking provides more than 3x the relevant data points for a comprehensive money management use case.
- The signal-to-noise ratio for Open Banking data is more than twice as good, resulting in more efficient and accurate categorisation.
- Valuable data points like merchant names are available in 52.7% of relevant Open Banking transactions versus 31.7% in screen-scraped ones.
Implications for the Industry
These findings demonstrate that Open Banking significantly outperforms screen scraping across a wide range of metrics. When we also consider the privacy and security benefits, it becomes evident that it’s time to phase out screen scraping in favour of Open Banking where it is available.
We can no longer justify using an unregulated and risky data-sharing method when a superior alternative is readily available.
Read the full report below to learn more about how Open Banking compares to screen scraping.
