Frollo, the open banking fintech acquired by NextGen in 2020, has published its latest ‘State of Open Banking’ report for 2026.
This is now the fifth edition of the annual report.
Open banking in Australia commenced on 1 July 2020 with the big four banks.
It was joined by the smaller banks in 2021, open energy in 2022, and open finance in 2026.
It is regulated by the ACCC and OAIC under the Consumer Data Right (CDR).
Tony Thrassis, Head of Open Banking Markets and Compliance at Frollo, said the conversation has well and truly moved on from bank compliance and data quality, which were prominent teething issues faced by the CDR regime in its early years.
“The foundations are in place and the momentum is real,” Thrassis said.
“The question is no longer whether open banking works. It’s how quickly we can make it work for everyone,” Thrassis emphasised.
Since going live in 2020, there have been almost 11 billion regulated CDR API invocations.
The latest data from the official government CDR performance dashboard shows there are 1.7 million active ongoing CDR authorisations.
Notably, this figure excludes one-off authorisations, which are highly prevalent in lending, which is the leading use case for CDR.
The official dashboard therefore understates actual CDR usage.
Even with one-off consents omitted, the official dashboard data clearly negates the persistent line of attack forthcoming from the Australian Banking Association (ABA) that “no one is using it”.
Moreover, it is a fact many ABA members are using open banking, and have been for years, leading some members to question who is feeding the ABA its narratives.
For example, both CommBank and Westpac use open banking for mortgages.
In the mutual space, Beyond Bank Australia launched branch-based open banking earlier this year to enhance its face-to-face customer experience. It is using open banking to turn around loan applications 50 per cent more quickly than under its old process.
Wendy den Hartog, Chief Operating Officer at Beyond Bank Australia, said: “When open banking started, it was probably seen more as a regulatory initiative, and it’s taken some time across the industry to really start to see progression and further use cases coming through.”
She added: “Now it’s no longer whether it’s something that you want to adopt. It’s about how quickly organisations can take the services and embed them into core lending processes.”
Frollo was founded by Gareth Gumbley in 2015 and has been a pioneer of open banking in Australia. It gained Accredited Data Recipient status in May 2020 and in July 2020 claimed to have made the first live open banking API call. (Although that claim is contested by Adatree.)
NextGen – Frollo’s parent – provides a digital lending and mortgage processing platform called ApplyOnline that connects mortgage brokers, aggregators, and lenders across Australia. It automates and streamlines the entire home loan journey from initial application and data validation to settlement
NextGen’s own data shows applications for mortgages facilitated by open banking grew 234 per cent over FY25-26, although some of that growth is non-bank lenders in addition to banks.
Frollo’s latest report also finds direct access to verified data is becoming a key safeguard for lenders as AI makes financial documents easier to fake, such as payslips and bank statements.
Additionally, CDR gives Australia a ready-made framework of standards, rules and law for AI agents and agentic commerce.
“What’s needed now is a shared focus on the friction points we already know: a smoother consent journey, reliable infrastructure at every bank, and policy settings that let data flow to where consumers and businesses need it,” Thrassis said.
“With industry and government working together, I’m confident the year ahead can be one of open banking’s strongest yet,” he said.
Frollo’s report highlights a specific issue with CDR consent journey abandonment rates, which are on par with screen scraping, and have stayed broadly static for two years.
Across three major banks – CommBank, Macquarie and ANZ – around two in three people who leave the open banking consent flow do so in the first steps at their bank.
The lack of easy and uniform customer experience – inside the banking app – is a problem for consent.
Banking Day is aware many PayTo providers face the same friction.
Moreover, business consumers remain significantly disadvantaged by a peculiar quirk in the CDR Rules that says being an account signatory or addressee who already has access to the account is not sufficient for CDR data sharing purposes. The CDR Rules therefore require a separate and additional process for the business to nominate an authorised representative who can then consent to share data.
Treasury selectively consulted on this reform in 2025 but has not yet announced any updates.
Banking Day has previously covered the ‘nom rep’ problem.
As Banking Day has previously reported, modelling by Lateral Economics for FinTech Australia published in April 2026 found three CDR policy decisions could add $1.2 billion a year to the economy by 2035.
Namely, keeping smaller banks in the CDR, introducing third-party disclosure consent (TPDC), and simplifying nominated representative arrangements for businesses.
About Frollo
Frollo is an Australian Open Banking and financial technology (fintech) provider dedicated to helping people improve their financial well-being and streamlining data sharing across the financial sector. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in North Sydney, Frollo serves consumers, businesses, and mortgage brokers by transforming real-time verified financial data into actionable insights.
The company operates under Australia’s government-regulated Consumer Data Right (CDR) framework and is regulated by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). In 2020, Frollo made history as the first fintech in Australia to go live with Open Banking. Today, it operates as part of the NextGen group, a leading provider of lending technology in Australia.
Source: bankingday.com
