Stryd

Australia’s open banking regime requires banks to share Product Reference Data (PRD) about their products such as home loans.

It’s an important feature of Australia’s data-led and consumer-focused Consumer Data Right (CDR).

The Hon Stephen Jones MP, Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services, has confirmed this will soon include Non-Bank Lenders (NBLs) too.

That’s because open banking is expanding into open finance, as the ground-breaking CDR extends into other sectors of the economy.

“The CDR will expand to non‑bank lending data early in the new year with the intent to be operational by the middle of 2026. This will provide non‑bank lenders with a sufficient transition period. This new data will play an important part in developing valuable use cases in the financial services sector,” said the Minister, in an address to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) in Sydney this August.

What is Product Reference Data (PRD)?

PRD is similar to the information you find in a Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) as well as other public sources such as websites and promotional brochures.

For home loans, this shared product data includes interest rates, fees, charges, eligibility criteria, features, discounts and descriptions.

It’s shared via API in standardised fields that have been set by the Data Standards Body (DSB).

When provided correctly, it helps banks - and soon non-bank lenders - to compete for new market share and retention in the crowded home loan space. This is for two reasons. First, when lenders provide accurate and usable PRD, it enables Stryd’s engine to include those products and share them automatically with mortgage brokers. Secondly, it is a way for lenders to monitor the market and keep tabs on the competition.

When accessed and used correctly, PRD helps consumers to have more choice, convenience and confidence in their financial products.

How to use PRD to compare the market

PRD enables users who can access that information to benchmark products in the market. For example, lenders can understand the competitiveness of their own loans and mortgage brokers can find a better deal for a borrower.

Theoretically, anyone can access PRD, as it’s required to be made publicly available via open APIs. However, in practice, in order to access it efficiently - and make it usable - you need to have a rules-based software engine.

At Stryd, we’ve built a fintech platform to ping the banks’ APIs and run a comprehensive set of business rules over it. Then we use that data to fuel our home loan repository, which is used by mortgage brokers, aggregators and lenders to scout the market and compare home loan products.

Home loan PRD can also be used by comparison websites and any other business in the consumer credit or real estate market.

Promoting CDR’s purposes: choice, convenience and confidence

Taking a step back for a minute, it’s important to remember that CDR’s goals are to give consumers more choice, convenience and confidence in their selection of products and services.

As a consumer, if you want to get a better deal, you need to find the deals in the market that are available to you. But many consumers simply don’t have the time or expertise to do all that legwork themselves.

This is why many consumers turn to comparison websites and professional advisors like mortgage brokers, who in turn can reference PRD (with the help of Stryd) to find a significant repository of information about a bank lender’s products, including credit related information such as loan-to-valuation ratio (LVR) bands.

Combining consumer data with product data is where the real CDR magic happens

PRD becomes even more powerful once the information is categorised in a meaningful way to facilitate a comparison of a consumer's existing home loan product against potentially better offers.

This is what our Stryd Broker application enables in conjunction with our Stryd Product Repository.

With the consent of the consumer, a mortgage broker can confirm the specifics of the borrower’s current bank loan using the Trusted Advisor access pathway to open banking and then automatically compare against the product pricing and credit policy data - all in one place as it’s located in our master repository - from 80+ bank lenders and 1,600+ products.

Our applications will become exponentially more powerful when we start to include product data from NBLs.

If you haven’t seen Stryd in action, you can book a demo here.

By leveraging PRD, Stryd has been able to identify that more than half of Australian home loan borrowers are not on the most competitive mortgage product and at times that figure is closer to two-thirds.

This figure represents a significant attrition risk to brokers and lenders.

It’s also a significant opportunity for comparison sites and aggregators to use PRD to protect trail books by using Stryd to find one or more better priced products that are suitable for the borrower.

Don’t risk churn in your back book because you missed a refinancing opportunity!

A big benefit of Stryd for brokers is that it’s a trail book retention tool with a risk-based product and pricing application that supports digital home loan origination.

By automating processes with Stryd, you can make faster and more accurate offers to borrowers and grow your business.

So don’t spend your own time and resources finding all the bank deals in the market!

Use our purpose-built Stryd solution to improve your efficiency, reduce manual processes and impress your customers with more competitive offers and new opportunities.