Insurtech Kanopi is calling on the government and industry to establish a working group tasked with seeing Consumer Data Right (CDR) services are rolled out this year.

Kanopi Founder and CEO Nigel Fellowes-Freeman says CDR reform will be transformative for the insurance sector yet it is unlikely to come into effect for the industry in 2023 as intended unless progress is accelerated.

"It’s been almost two years since it's been announced and yet there are very few consumer applications in the market for the policy and technology underpinning it,” Mr Fellowes-Freeman said. He wants the Government to address the delays in its budget announcement on Tuesday.

"If this budget is to focus on the cost of living, it would be remiss for it to totally ignore the CDR, given it was previously mentioned by the Federal Government as one of the greatest catalysts to business competition in Australia,” he said.

“We need to get to the bottom of why progress on this has stalled.”

Mr Fellowes-Freeman also called for accelerated research and development (R&D) payments and a clarified and simplified grants process, saying R&D incentives “feel like they are the sole form of Federal government support for the sector” and that grants and other benefits on offer are ad-hoc, difficult to understand and “even harder to apply for”.

It should be made easier for startups to clearly understand what programs they can and can’t apply for, Kanopi says.

The insurtech says the single greatest challenge for the sector is the “pinch of talent shortages being felt across all industries” which is pushing salaries beyond what a startup can pay, and stalling growth.

“Australia’s pool of tech talent is dire,” Mr Fellowes-Freeman said.

“The obvious fix to this is to encourage the migration of tech talent from abroad. There will likely be a national response to this in the budget and we can only hope that it includes the startup and technology sector given it's the next driver of overall economic growth.”