ACSISS solves a big problem for accountants & bookkeepers with open banking

Australia’s leading independent provider of secure bank data services, SISS Data Services, has today launched ACSISS Adviser to allow accountants, bookkeepers and other trusted advisers to securely receive financial transaction data from their clients.

“Bank transaction records are vital to the accounting process” says Grant Augustin, co-founder and CEO of SISS. “From my experience in practice, I know only too well how frustrating it can be when you have to stop work and chase up a client for transaction records”.  Accountants often rely on bank data feeds within their online accounting systems, however these suffer from limited range of banks and account types, or reliability issues for those that rely on screen-scraping.

“In these days of heightened awareness about data security, more accountants and their clients are refusing to share online banking credentials, meaning that the traditional ‘screen-scraping’ method doesn’t work reliably” continued Augustin, “it was clear to me that accountants and their clients need a better way – and the new Open Banking technology delivers not only better security, but greater reliability and a broader range of banks and account types”.

Open Banking, the widely used term for the first phase of the Commonwealth government’s Consumer Data Right initiative seeks to empower consumers to make better financial decisions by securely sharing their financial information, such as bank transactions, with nominated third parties.  About a year ago, the regulations were amended to enable consumers to share their data with “Trusted Advisers” including accountants, bookkeepers, auditors, lawyers and mortgage brokers through Accredited Data Recipients, such as SISS and their ACSISS solution.

Consumers will use a simple app “ACSISS My Data” to control what data they share and with whom.  Clients can look-up their accountant on the list of trusted advisers, select the accounts they wish to share, and their accountant will then receive copies of their transaction records (ie bank statements) going back as far 2017.  Accountants will then use that transaction data in a variety of ways, depending on the tasks they’re performing for the client, and the systems they use.

“ACSISS Adviser immediately solves a large and growing problem for accountants and their clients” says Augustin “we’ve harnessed the latest technology to enable consumers to securely share their data, to enable accountants and advisers to receive that data reliably and accurately, and to free both consumers and their advisers from the risks of sharing online banking credentials.”