Open banking was supposed to make personal finance simpler. The technical promise was real: account data could be shared, with consent, across products, removing the need for screen-scraping or manual exports. Several years in, the data has indeed become easier to move. The clarity of the resulting picture, for most users, has not improved nearly as much.
The reason is that data movement and data clarity are different problems. Open banking solved the first. The second — turning a clean feed into a usable understanding — is a product and design problem, not a connectivity one. Products that built on top of open banking inherited the underlying feed but not the interpretive layer that would make it valuable.
Coverage is part of the issue. In Australia, open banking under the Consumer Data Right covers a wide set of institutions, but not every account type. Joint accounts, trust accounts, business accounts, and certain investment structures are still patchy. The household that has the most to gain from a unified view is often the household whose accounts are not all fully accessible.
Consent ergonomics are another issue. Open banking consents tend to expire, require re-authorisation, and rely on a flow that varies by institution. A product that depends on continuous data access ends up spending a non-trivial share of its UX surface managing consent rather than presenting insight. Users feel this as a low-grade reliability problem, even when each individual reauth flow is short.
There is also the categorisation problem. The feed coming through open banking is structurally cleaner than scraped data, but it is still raw. The work of turning a bank-supplied 'TRF FROM SAV ACC' line into useful meaning falls on the product, not the rail. Many products underinvested in this layer, assuming the cleaner feed would do more of the lifting than it does.
Finally, there is the trust question. Users are now more aware of who has access to their financial data, and the threshold for granting that access has correspondingly risen. A product that asks for open-banking consent has to earn it by being demonstrably more useful than the manual alternative, which often means a CSV or PDF upload that does most of the same work without the consent burden.
Open banking is still a meaningful piece of infrastructure, and over a longer horizon it will probably become the default way personal finance data moves. The lesson of the first few years is that the rail was the easy part. The hard part is the interpretation layer on top, and that work is still largely undone.
Products that do that interpretation well — whether or not they rely on open banking — are the ones that will define the next phase of personal finance. The rail does not produce clarity by itself. Someone still has to design it.
Key takeaway
Open banking made data movement easier. It did not make data clearer. The two problems are different, and most products have only made progress on the first.