Fintechs divided on screen scraping ban
Founding director of The Regtech Association and Verifier CEO, Lisa Schutz, has urged for the Australian government to follow in the footsteps of the European Union (EU) and cease screen scraping.
“I believe passionately that screen scraping should be prohibited as it is in the EU,” she told the Senate Committee of Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology on Thursday.
Screen scraping is the process where customers give a third-party company, such as a fintech firm, permission to access their data before taking a “snapshot” of it and using it to deliver a service or product to the customer.
She explained that while Verifier has the option to use screen scraping, it has instead chosen to access customer data under the 12 principles of the Privacy Act so it does not impede on the privacy of consumers.
“It’s the long way to get the right outcome … [but] it comes back to what is the 2050 Australia that we want to live in,” she said.
Schutz also took the opportunity to address how the Consumer Data Right, specifically Open Banking, would enable the sharing of data in a controlled and respectable manner.
The other alternative, she proposed, was to follow in the footsteps of the EU, which “put [a] sunset on screen scraping and that was for 18 months”.
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