Simplifying CDR’s “nom rep” friction to deliver $1.4bn in business benefits

Steve Kemp from SISS Data Services

Speaking on a panel at FinTech Australia’s inaugural Fintech Data Horizons Summit in Sydney on Friday, 8 May 2026, Steve Kemp, Head of Strategic Relationships at SISS Data Services, said the number one change he would like to see in open banking under the Consumer Data Right (CDR) is the simplification of the “nom rep” problem.

SISS Data Services is a CDR Accredited Data Recipient providing “accounting-grade” bank data to its clients via open banking as well as direct feeds.

Kemp was referring to the CDR-wide requirement for businesses to go through a formal process to nominate an official representative who can consent to data sharing.

The regime’s rules do not automatically allow an account holder or signatory — or any other party who is already authorised to transact on the account — to be a “nominated representative.”

As a result, banks must implement a separate process for this representative to be nominated by the business.

That process is not standardised.

Nor is it required to be digital.

Banks can require the representative to physically attend a branch, and fill in paperwork with 100 points of identification, even if that person is already an identified and authorised account signatory.

“Business consumers are confused and they’re not getting through the process,” Kemp said.

“The rules should be changed to digitise it,” he advocated.

MYOB confirms “nom rep” is a source of friction

At Thursday evening’s Women in Open Banking ANZ third annual Sydney summit, hosted by Baker McKenzie with Mastercard Open Finance, Courtney Sloane, Head of Government Relations Australia & New Zealand at MYOB, added her voice.

Courtney Sloane from MYOB raised the “nom rep” problem at the Women in Open Banking summit

Sloane said “customers are blown away” by the valuable difference of open banking versus direct feeds, however, the business consent journey is clunky due to the “nom rep” process.

Lateral Economics has modelled $1.4bn in business benefits

In late April 2026, Lateral Economics published a report titled “Economic Modelling of Consumer Data Right Reforms.”

The report was prepared with the help of FinTech Australia and several fintechs — including Biza.io, Intuit QuickBooks, SISS Data Services, Stay or Go, WeMoney and Xero.

Lateral Economics found there is economic merit in simplifying the “nom rep” requirements.

Benefits include time savings for businesses, reduction in screen scraping, productivity gains for bookkeepers, and enabling key high-value open banking use cases at scale, such as cloud accounting integrations (e.g. Intuit QuickBooks, MYOB, Xero) and business lending pipelines.

The Lateral Economics report concludes there are significant benefits from the proposed nominated representative reform amounting to over $460 million per annum by 2035, with a present value over 10 years of up to $1.4 billion.

These benefits could be even larger — and achieved more quickly — depending on how rapidly cloud accounting platforms move to migrate their large customer bases onto open banking.

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