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Guide
What the Consumer Data Right is, and where our rates come from
Australia's Consumer Data Right requires every bank to publish its product rates, fees and features in a standard machine-readable form. What that data is, who sets the standard, what it covers, and how Open Market Intel reads it each day.
In one paragraph
The Consumer Data Right (CDR) is an Australian law that gives consumers the right to share data a business holds about them, and requires some businesses to publish data about their products. Banking was the first sector, from July 2020, followed by energy. The product side is called product reference data: every bank, mutual and non-bank lender on the CDR register must publish its current products, rates, fees, features and eligibility rules through a public interface in a standard format. That published data is what every rate on this site is read from.
Who runs it
The right is set out in Part IVD of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) accredits data recipients, keeps the register of data holders and enforces the rules. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) oversees the privacy safeguards. The Data Standards Body publishes the Consumer Data Standards, the technical specification every data holder's interface must follow, including the shape of a product, a rate tier and a fee.
What product reference data holds
For each product a data holder publishes its name and category (home loan, savings account, term deposit, credit card, personal loan, transaction account and so on), its lending or deposit rates with the conditions that apply to each (the loan purpose, repayment type, fixed term, loan-to-value band, balance band, bonus conditions and introductory periods), its comparison rate where the law requires one, its fees, its features and its eligibility rules.
A product with several rate tiers is published as several rate entries. A home loan can carry dozens: one for each combination of purpose, repayment type, fixed term and LVR band. That is why a lender's page here lists each tier in words, and why one advertised figure on a website is often one tier among many.
What it does not hold
Product reference data is public and about products, not people. It holds no customer information and needs no consent to read. It also carries no history: a data holder publishes what is current, so the rate changes you see here come from reading the data every day and comparing it with the day before. Nobody publishes a change feed; the record of who moved, when and by how much is built from daily reads.
Some products are not in it. A rate negotiated with a broker, a pricing-by-application discount, or a special that a lender offers only through a branch has no entry unless the lender chooses to publish one. Where a lender publishes a product but no rate (for example, pricing on application), the product is listed without a rate.
How Open Market Intel reads it
Open Market Intel reads each lender's published product data through the Consumer Data Right interfaces, daily, and records every product's rate tiers, fees and features as the lender published them. A tier that moved since the previous read is a rate change. Changes are checked against the lender's own published data before they are told as stories, sent as alerts or shown in the feeds.
The rate a product page shows as its headline is the lowest standard rate the lender publishes for that product (for a deposit, the highest), with the rule stated beside it. A lender that is temporarily not publishing is marked as such and drops out of the comparisons until it publishes again.
Why it matters for comparing rates
Until the Consumer Data Right, comparing rates meant reading each lender's website or relying on what lenders sent to comparison sites. Published data makes the comparison complete (every data holder, not only those who pay to be listed), current (read daily), and consistent (the same fields for every lender). What it cannot do is tell you which product suits you: it says what each product costs and who can apply, in the lender's own words.