Financial Services News

The Federal Court has issued Macquarie Bank with a $10 million fine for its failure to prevent and detect unauthorised third-party fee withdrawals from customer cash management accounts. The Court found that the bank, Australia’s fifth biggest by market cap,...

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has announced a major change to its most senior executive ranks, with the regulator’s chief executive, Warren Day, to depart from the regulator. Day’s interim replacement, Greg Yanco, is also expected to exit...

Australian wealthtech developer GBST has announced it has developed a new investor technology platform that enables individual Australian and New Zealand investors and managers to invest in the wholesale private equity market. The wholesale market has previously only been accessible...

Newly appointed National Australia Bank (NAB) chief executive Andrew Irvine has announced key changes to its executive line-up, achieving a gender parity milestone within its senior leadership ranks. Rachel Slade, who heads NAB’s personal banking team, will step into Irvine’s...

RACQ-backed home and contents insurtech business, Honey Insurance, has concluded a successful $108 million capital raise – Australia’s largest ever Series A funding round, the company has announced. The funding round was led by US-based private investment firm Gallatin Point...

One of Australia’s big four health insurers, nib, has announced it has completed its full migration of on-premise workloads to public cloud services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS). nib reports that more than 95 per cent of workloads across all...

A range of New Zealand-based financial services providers will be subject to new standard licencing conditions requiring operationally resilient technology systems and shortened reporting timeframes for cyber and outage incidents. The new conditions, imposed by NZ’s financial regulator the Financial...

Dual ASX and NZX-listed Kiwi bank Heartland has increased its toehold in the Australian market, announcing it has been granted indicative regulatory approval to acquire Challenger group’s banking arm. Approval for the takeover, which was required and granted indicatively by...

Sydney-based banking technology developer Constantinople has announced it has successfully reached its capital raise target, with investors kicking in AU$50 million to support the fintech’s operations and growth aspirations. The Series A round was led by Prosus Ventures, a Dutch...

HSBC Bank Australia has accepted a $33,000 fine from the competition watchdog for alleged breaches of Consumer Data Right (CDR) data request rules. The ACCC issued notices to HSBC for two separate breaches of the CDR rules, both of which...

Open Banking data, accessed via Australia’s Consumer Data Right (CDR) scheme, is cleaner, more insightful, and offers significant efficiency advantages over screen scraped datasets, according to the author of a new study released by open data specialist fintech Frollo. As...

A majority of financial difficulty complaints received by AFCA relate to customer hardship requests being left unanswered, according to the latest data from Australia’s financial dispute ombudsman. As part of its latest complaints round-up, AFCA revealed that more than half...

Westpac has announced it has now switched on the real-time payments initiation service for billers, PayTo, for its institutional and commercial payees. The capability will be integrated into Westpac’s digital receivables platform QuickStream, offering Westpac’s larger corporate customers “a consolidated...

ANZ Bank has announced it will implement a range of new security measures to protect customers from scams, including a new artificial intelligence-backed Scam Scoring model. Among the newly announced anti-scam measures to be introduced by ANZ in 2024 include:...

A new Federal Government-commissioned report has found the regulatory obligations on customer-owned banks remain too onerous, with the mutual sector “disproportionately affected by the compliance burden”. The report, Better Competition, Better Prices, drafted by the House of Representatives Standing Committee...