When Colin Jowell’s father passed away recently, tracking down and closing his accounts and subscriptions was the last thing on Colin’s mind.

But as the direct debits kept coming, he realised there had to be a better way – and saw the opportunity that CDR and open banking offered.

“My dad was a very organised man,” Jowell told Information Age.

“He had everything in its place, and had tried to think of everything – except for one direct debit for $20 per month that he didn’t even know he was paying, to a utility that he wasn’t even using.”

With bills, streaming services, club memberships, meal delivery services, and other ‘sticky subscriptions’ using ‘dark patterns’ to suck money out of our credit cards and bank accounts on a monthly basis, the average Australian spends an estimated $105 per month on scheduled payments they may well have forgotten about.

With those direct-debit arrangements likely outlasting many of the more than 190,000 Australians who die each year, executors end up fighting dense bureaucracies to shut down services and stop regular direct debits.

“It took us nine months to get that money back,” Jowell said, recalling the “administrative nightmare” as he called to cancel accounts and cringed at requests to “speak to the account holder…. Dad would not have wanted this for our family.”

“If I had been less of a dogmatic individual, I’d have just let the money go,” he added. “But at the time, I just decided that I needed to win this one.”

Jowell got to thinking about his own experiences managing the household bills – and realised that his knowledge about where, when, and how much money was being spent would be lost if he suddenly died.

“Our billing situation is far more dynamic than our asset situation, so it needs more constant attention and is less worthy of attention than a traditional will,” he said in explaining how his newly launched solution to the problem, known as BillWill, came to fruition.

A former marketing and branding specialist who was studying at the London School of Economics (LSE) to become a behavioural scientist, Jowell talked with people to see whether his experience resonated with them and what they would pay for a solution.

Even after finishing his thesis – which was about the benefits of pre-death planning – Jowell saw BillWill “as a way of understanding decision making under grief,” noting a research survey in which 70 per cent of respondents worry about the life admin they will leave behind when they die.

“I tried to become a behavioural scientist and did that for a year,” Jowell recalled, but the idea of BillWill “wouldn’t leave me,” he said.

By last October “I realised this had to be a full-time thing, and in February we dropped the hammer on development.”

A new use case for CDR

Designed to streamline the administrative burden after a loved one passes, BillWill automatically identifies which bills a person is paying, then continually updates a list to help family members wind down the services upon the user’s death.

It is based on the consumer data right (CDR) – an enabler of open banking that allows banks and financial services companies, utilities, and eventually telecommunications and other companies to automatically and securely download a user’s information.

CDR launched several years ago but miniscule adoption, high costs for banks and the popularity of less-secure ‘screen scraping’ services last year drove the government to explore why CDR wasn’t resonating with the 99.69 per cent of Australians who are not, according to an Australian Banking Association (ABA) review published earlier this year, using it.

Innovative companies – known in CDR parlance as accredited data recipients (ADR) – “are struggling to uncover compelling use cases and gain traction with consumers,” the review found, noting that just five “key use case categories” have emerged across personal financial management, business management services, CDR connectivity services, digital lending, and product comparison.

The 88,000 Australians who have signed up for CDR-powered services are spread across 83 different ADRs, the review found – and the fact that over half allowed data sharing arrangements to lapse suggests many consumers see little value in the services.

ADRs spend so much setting up CDR infrastructure that “compliance costs are crowding out strategic investment”, the ABA review found, warning that “unsubstantiated consumer propositions” and a heavy financial burden “have limited the capacity for other technology investments that are more aligned to consumer demand.”

Finding and promoting relevant use cases is a core element of the recently announced reset of CDR, which was laid out in a consultation paper that remains open for submissions until 9 September and flagged the need for “operational enhancements to support use cases.”

Among the changes is action initiation – which will allow third-party firms to open and close accounts on your behalf, eventually enabling BillWill to offer a one-click service that cancels your recurring payments and closes your subscriptions and accounts.

Jowell – whose five-strong team includes two former executives of open banking pioneer Frollo, one of which also founded BillWill implementation partner Obi Tech – knows full well that harnessing CDR’s capabilities will be crucial to building that elusive open banking success story.

“We could have launched the service without open banking,” he said, “but there was no way we could make it into a decent experience – and we’ve been building with action initiation in mind.”

Obi Tech’s algorithms for intelligently processing CDR data, he said, “are rapidly increasing in accuracy: I’ve been staggered at how quickly the algorithm is learning.”

“This is a way of letting people continue to live the life that they normally live,” he continued, “and just having a really simple way of sorting out [a person’s affairs] when things change.”

“In two or three years, it will be a customer’s expectation that this is the norm.”