Financial Services News

Australia’s big four banks have separately agreed to extend their pauses on regional branch closures until mid-2027, confirming their agreements with the Federal Government. National Australia Bank (NAB) has committed to a new moratorium on regional branch closures, while the...

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and Telstra have announced the rollout of a new behavioural and pattern detection technology expected to cut instances of account opening fraud by up to a quarter. ‘Fraud Indicator’, which went live earlier this...

Big industry fund, Cbus, has been hit with another enforceable undertaking imposed by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA). APRA announced it has taken further action to address material prudential concerns identified with United Super Pty Ltd (United Super) and to...

Delicensed crypto trader Binance Australia Derivatives, part of the global cryptocurrency juggernaut Binance group, is being sued by Australia’s financial services regulator for its alleged failure to provide retail investor clients mandated consumer protections. In documents filed to the Federal...

Early incarnations of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are showing enormous promise for the global financial sector, opening up new trade opportunities and accelerating global payments and commerce. However, the largely siloed development of digital currencies and their supporting infrastructure...

ANZ has announced a major extension of its Express Payments facility, enabling more than 400 international banks, including non-ANZ customers, to route inbound cross-border payments through Australia’s domestic real-time payments network, the New Payments Platform (NPP). ANZ Express Payments, which...

Fellow NSW-based member-owned banks Teachers Mutual Bank (TMB) and Australian Mutual Bank (AMB) have confirmed they are in formal talks to merge. The pair have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to explore the viability of a merger, which would...

New Zealand’s competition regulator, the Commerce Commission (ComCom), has proposed new laws to regulate interchange fees and lower existing interchange fee caps for credit and debit card payments, likely to save Kiwis hundreds of millions in transaction surcharges. The ComCom,...

HSBC Bank Australia failed to adequately protect its customers from scams, resulting in losses of more than $20 million to fraudsters who were able to spoof customers and hack their bank accounts virtually unchecked, financial services regulator ASIC detailed in...

MLC Life Insurance is to merge with Resolution Life Australasia forming what will be one of the nation’s largest life insurance businesses, Acenda. The merge results from MLC Life’s parent, Nippon Life Insurance Company acquiring 100 per cent of Resolution...

The future of money transactions in New Zealand must include physical cash, citizens say, with a record number of Kiwis voicing concerns about the lack of suitable digital payment alternatives currently in-market. A public consultation conducted by the country’s banking...

Suncorp has confirmed a five-year deal with Microsoft to help accelerate its use and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and Azure public cloud.  The pair will extend their existing partnership – a cloud-focused deal confirmed in early 2023 – to...

Credit card and payments giant Visa has announced it will phase out SMS One-Time Passwords (OTPs) as the sole factor for payment authentication in response to the growing threats posed by artificial intelligence (AI). As part of Visa’s new Security...

Victorian mutual BankVic has confirmed the adoption of Newgen’s end-to-end workflow automation delivery platform, NewgenONE. The low-code, cloud-based platform, which was progressively implemented by BankVic from the middle of 2024, has helped “to streamline [the bank’s] day-to-day operations” and, ultimately,...

Bendigo Bank is reporting a material uplift in customer service efficiency following the migration of its contact centre operations to Amazon Web Service’s (AWS’s) Connect platform last year. Since its adoption of the AWS public cloud-based customer contact centre in...