Macquarie Bank is getting a head start on the Australian Government's push for Open Banking by sharing customer data feeds with Zip's personal financial management app Pocketbook.
Acquired by Zip in 2016, Pocketbook is the largest non-bank Australian PFM app with over 400,000 users.
Its connection to Macquarie Bank's recently launched Open Banking platform coincides with the Federal Government’s focus on establishing open API standards to increase competition and provide consumers with the ability to securely share their data with third party providers.
NAB launched an API portal back in December 2016, but has so far limited data services to incorporate branch and ATM location, and foreign exchange rates, rather than customer transactional data.
While Australia's leading banks have been dragging their feet, Macquarie's head of personal banking, Ben Perham, says: “We think this is the right thing to do for our customers - it’s their information, and if they want to use their data to connect with another service, Macquarie wants to make that easy and secure."