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The Australian Treasury has released draft legislation for public consultation that would give the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) regulatory powers over digital wallet providers including Apple Pay and Google Wallet... More
The Australia and New Zealand Bank (ANZ) is to pilot the use of a prototype central bank digital currency (CBDC) for offline transactions using pre-loaded contactless cards at RMIT University in the Australian city of Melbourne and Southern Cross University in New South Wales... More
A quarter of all debit and credit card transactions made in Australia are now made using a mobile wallet (25%), up from 10% in the March quarter of 2020, according to figures from the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). ... More
The Bank of International Settlements and the central banks of Australia, Malaysia and Singapore have completed a joint project to develop a shared platform that could facilitate direct cross-border transactions between institutions using different central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)... More
An Australian parliamentary committee has held a public hearing at which it heard evidence from representatives of leading Australian banks, payment services providers and other financial bodies on regulatory issues including whether companies such as Apple should be mandated to allow third-party payment apps access to a smartphone’s NFC chip... More
Australia’s new payments platform goes live — ITNews — “The NPP [New Payments Platform] works like a ‘secure set of rails’ between banks so they can send payment messages in real time to each other via the Reserve Bank. The platform allows services to run on top of the NPP — like Bpay’s Osko, which is the first so-called overlay service to arrive on the platform. Osko lets consumers transfer money to someone via their mobile phone number or email address in real-time, 24/7. It also enables them to send a 280-character description with their payment.”
An eAUD? — Reserve Bank of Australia — “An electronic form of banknotes could coexist with the electronic payment systems operated by the banks, although the case for this new form of money is not yet established… The issuing authority could issue electronic currency in the form of files or ‘tokens’. These tokens could be stored in digital wallets, provided by financial institutions and others. These tokens could then be used for payments in a similar way that physical banknotes are used today.”
How Australians pay: Evidence from the 2016 Consumer Payments survey — Reserve Bank of Australia — “Cards were the most frequently used means of payment in the 2016 survey, overtaking cash for the first time. Contactless ‘tap and go’ cards are an increasingly popular way of making payments, displacing cash for many lower-value transactions… Consumers are increasingly using their mobile phones to make online and person-to-person payments.”
Tap-and-go kills the cash cow — Sydney Morning Herald – “Australia has become a nation of tappers, with official figures showing that the card has finally overtaken cash as our most-frequently-used payment method… The Reserve Bank attributes that to several factors, including the widespread rollout of tap-and-go Eftpos functionality. Around one-third of all point-of-sale payments are now made using tap-and-go.”
Six retail branches of Citi bank in Australia are to stop dealing with cash because of falling demand from customers who prefer to manage their money digitally, the Sydney Morning Herald reports... More