We are now live under Australia’s Consumer Data Right (CDR).
Which means that, once customers agree to share their data, Lucie can connect straight to their bank, and their accounts and transactions come through into the app. We do it through Fiskil, an open data platform that holds the CDR accreditation; Lucie operates as Fiskil’s CDR representative and picks up the CDR obligations that come with that.
This is rather a big deal for us. The first real bank accounts are already linked, through the same consent process a customer will use, with real balances and real transactions coming through.
What’s the CDR?
Getting access to your banking data outside your bank’s app has been possible for years, mostly through two common ways, but each with problems:
- You can download it yourself, getting hold of transaction records or statements. All banks allow you to download your own data in this way. It’s fine but obviously awkward and time-consuming and you have to keep doing it manually forever.
- Or there’s screen scraping, which is how a fair few well-known apps still work: you give a service your internet banking username and password, it logs in as you, and it reads your screens. That takes away the pain of having to do all the work yourself. But the thing is that you have to give your credentials to somebody else, which is a real worry with all the obvious security concerns associated with doing so.
The CDR (often called open banking in its first iteration) works a different way. You tell your bank to send us your data, and the bank sends it, down a secure, standard, regulated channel built for the purpose. Your login stays yours. You can see what you’ve agreed to, on your own bank’s dashboard, and you can pull your consent whenever you like. The CDR was built to overcome the problems with existing arrangements. It’s the government-supported standard system; it’s increasingly being used across the banking industry and now it’s being extended to other industries like power.
Getting the data right
Our mission is to create a personal agent that reaches across the whole of a person’s money life and delivers help at the moment a decision is being made. We’re starting with day-to-day banking.
But we can’t do any of that without accurate data, collected securely. That’s why we’re using the CDR. And that’s why so much of the last year has gone on data architecture and plumbing. The figures Lucie puts in front of you are designed to come through verified paths from the bank itself, with the AI’s job being to make sense of them and explain them to you in a way that’s actually useful. I’ve written about that at more length before.
Why this is important
Most people are doing their best with their money and still aren’t sure it’s enough. That’s one of the gaps I think Lucie can close.
So once your accounts are connected, the intention is that you can ask Lucie the things you’d actually want to know. What can I afford this month? Is that bill covered? Where has my spending drifted since last time?
Or say you fancy getting to Japan next year. The idea is you could talk it through: what putting a bit aside each week would have to look like in the time you’ve got; what that does to the rest of your month; what it would mean to use money you’d earmarked for something else.
But more than that, and this is the important part: we’re building Lucie so that you can have a proper conversation with the agent, based on your own numbers, with confidence in the accuracy of that data. It’s this integration of secure, accurate data with conversational AI that makes Lucie different. And we couldn’t do this nearly as well without the CDR.
A first step
Lucie is still in build, of course. What has gone live is the foundation: a regulated, consented feed of real bank data, arriving properly. And we’ve still got a lot of testing and refinement to do. But everything we put on top of this rests on the foundation being right, which is why this is such a big deal for us.
If you’d like to be part of our journey, there’s a waitlist at lucie.money.