Encouraging Consumers to Switch to Better Financial Products
Australia, 2018
Australian Government Treasury, QUT’s Queensland Behavioural Economics Group (QuBE) , Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA)
Encouraging Consumers to Switch to Better Financial Products
The Consumer Data Right in Australia gives consumers greater visibility and control over their data, empowering them to choose with whom and for what purposes to share their data. Service providers are also required to disclose information about their products to facilitate comparison between services. These two factors allow consumers to seamlessly switch between products. But, reducing information asymmetries is not enough, consumers must act upon that information. Participants focused on using behavioural insights so that comparison services could nudge consumers to leverage the available data to switch providers effectively. On the other hand, current privacy consents are not designed in the most understandable way. The Consumer Data Right also aimed to change this. As a second challenge, teams also worked on using behavioural insights to improve the presentation of the choice to share consumer data.e.