Digital Identity Legislation

The banking industry remains supportive of the intent of the proposed changes and provides a range of suggestions to enhance the Bill’s clarity, while ensuring the provisions are future proof and enable beneficial and workable flexibility in the ways customers receive communications from their credit providers.

The ABA remains very supportive of the Treasury’s ongoing efforts to improve the technology neutrality of the Treasury portfolio and look forward to further engagement on this, and subsequent, tranches of legislative change.

Industry’s main comments regard allowing:
• (under National Credit Code (NCC)) the ‘publish and notify’ and ‘in any other way agreed to’ methods of communications which are permitted under the Corporations Act;
• more than one address to be used at any given time, which may be appropriate depending on the type of communications; and,
• communications via secure portals instead of an email address, as securely housing certain notifications and communications within the credit providers (CP) information system, where it can be retrieved by customers after appropriate authentication, better balances the need for accessibility, security and technology neutrality.

ABA reiterates our view that there is significant potential economic benefit in the government’s digital identity initiative for consumers and businesses. The development of both government and private sector digital identity systems is needed to achieve wider adoption, and therefore realise the potential economic benefits of this government policy. That will continue to depend on whether the proposed legislative framework provides clarity, ensures robust privacy safeguards for users, provides flexibility to innovate and incentives to participate, while minimising the potential for conflicting or inconsistent data and privacy obligations for participants.