In yet another mound of shit heaped upon the pile currently crushing any potential dream you may have of one day actually owning a house, Australian banks will soon be looking at your food delivery app habits, among other things, while assessing whether or not to give you a home loan. Meaning those of us who enjoy the nice bike man bringing us the good food on the slightly-more-than-regular could soon find it much, much, much more difficult to secure any type of loan that makes the purchase of a house actually possible.
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The short version of the story here is that banks are pushing for a new scheme called “open banking” which isn’t legislated as of yet, but is being pushed for quite hard.
Under that, banks will have consumer-approved access to a much wider variety of digital banking and transaction records when assessing eligibility for home loans.
At the moment, a home loan is assessed purely on the basis of things like grocery bills, medical expenses, and household bills (power/water/internet, etc). Under open banking, your entire digital transaction history would be assessed, with bankers specifically looking at things like online shopping and food delivery app spending.
In essence, if you apply for a home loan banks will be able to poke around and hold things like that drunken order of 30 spring rolls you put in after staggering home from the pub last weekend against you.
The proposed scheme obviously poses massive privacy risks for people’s personal data, and it’s hard to see how any guarantee from financial institutions could provide anything but consternation.
The push for open banking comes at a time where banks are under pressure to crack down on loaning people money to buy houses, as the property bubble continues to split apart at long-ass last.
The slightly good news here is that the information will only be accessed “with the customer’s permission” (though try getting approved for a loan without saying yes). Furthermore, there’s still a decent amount of time before open banking is implemented; the framework is not expected to be fully adopted by the big four banks until July 1st, 2019.
So, if you’re on the verge of pulling the trigger on an application but cannot deny your love of delivery chippies, now might be the time to go for it.
