Three years ago, the Australian fintech sector was buzzing about Consumer Data Right. Open banking was finally here. Customers could share their banking data with third parties. Innovation would flourish. The big banks would face real competition.

The reality has been more complicated. Some things changed significantly. Others barely moved. And the most interesting developments weren’t the ones anyone predicted.

What Actually Happened

The big promise was that customers would use CDR to switch banks easily, compare products accurately, and access better financial services from nimble fintech startups. The take-up has been slower than expected.

As of early 2026, around 2.3 million Australians have used CDR-enabled services. That sounds substantial until you realize there are roughly 25 million banking customers in Australia. We’re talking about less than 10% adoption after three years.

But raw numbers miss the point. The customers who did adopt CDR-enabled services are using them frequently. These are financially engaged consumers who were already comparing products, tracking spending, and looking for better deals. CDR made their lives easier, but it didn’t create behavior that wasn’t already there.

Where the Real Innovation Happened

The unexpected story is what happened in B2B fintech. Small businesses have been early adopters of CDR-enabled services at much higher rates than consumers.

The use case is straightforward: a business needs to prove its financial position to get a loan, lease equipment, or negotiate payment terms with suppliers. Instead of providing months of bank statements and financial reports, they can authorize a CDR data share. The decision happens in hours instead of weeks.

Accounting platforms integrated CDR early. Xero and MYOB saw the opportunity to become the hub for business financial data, not just accounting software. They’ve built services around that access: automated loan applications, cash flow forecasting, supplier payment optimization.

This wasn’t the consumer revolution that regulators and fintechs talked about in 2023, but it’s created real value for a segment that desperately needed it.

The Big Banks’ Response

The major banks spent 2023 and 2024 treating CDR as a compliance obligation. They built the minimum viable product, made data available as required, and waited to see what would happen.

By late 2024, they realized defensive posture wasn’t enough. If customers were going to share data anyway, banks wanted to be the ones providing the value-added services. We’ve seen a wave of acquisitions and partnerships in the past 12 months.

CBA bought a personal finance management startup. NAB partnered with several expense tracking platforms. Westpac launched its own CDR-powered small business lending product. ANZ went a different direction, focusing on becoming the best data provider and charging fintechs for API access above the free tier.

The strategy isn’t to stop CDR - that ship sailed - but to make sure banks remain central to the customer relationship even when data is portable.

The Fintech Reality Check

For fintech startups, CDR has been both opportunity and challenge. Access to banking data removed a significant barrier to entry, but it also created new costs and complexity.

The technical requirements are non-trivial. You need to be an Accredited Data Recipient, implement strict security controls, handle data with care, and maintain compliance with evolving standards. For a 10-person startup, that’s a significant drag on resources.

The survivors have been companies that found specific, high-value use cases where CDR access was necessary but not sufficient. They built products that did something genuinely useful with the data, not just displayed it in a dashboard.

Examples: automated tax compliance for contractors, spending analysis for hospitality businesses, cash flow prediction for seasonal businesses. These are narrow use cases with clear value propositions. The broad consumer finance apps that promised to revolutionize how Australians manage money have largely failed to gain traction.

What’s Next

CDR is expanding beyond banking. Energy data sharing started in 2023. Telecommunications is coming in 2026. The pattern will probably repeat: slower consumer adoption than expected, faster business adoption where there’s a clear pain point.

The fintech companies that positioned themselves as multi-sector data platforms are looking smart right now. If you can handle banking, energy, and telco data in one place, you can build services that weren’t possible before. Imagine a cash flow management tool for retailers that factors in seasonal sales patterns (banking data), energy costs (utility data), and customer foot traffic patterns (telco location data).

These integrated services are where the next wave of innovation will come from. Not from simply making banking data portable, but from combining datasets in ways that create genuinely new insights.

The Honest Assessment

Three years in, CDR hasn’t transformed Australian banking for consumers. The big banks are still dominant. Most people still make financial decisions the same way they did in 2023.

But it has created infrastructure for innovation. The companies building on that infrastructure have learned what works: specific use cases, clear value propositions, and often B2B rather than B2C models.

The fintech revolution didn’t arrive as predicted. But something more interesting might be emerging instead - a financial services industry where data portability is just table stakes, and the competition is about what you build with that data, not whether you have access to it at all.

That’s a more mature market. It’s also a harder one to compete in, which is probably why we’re seeing consolidation. The next few years will show whether the infrastructure we built was worth the investment.