Financial Services News

Beyond Bank Australia and Police and Nurses Limited (PNL) have announced that they are exploring a potential merger that would, if agreed to, create one of Australia’s biggest mutual banks. Confirming today the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU),...

The OAIC has filed civil penalty proceedings in the Federal Court against Medibank Private Limited related to its 2022 data breach.

The Federal Court has relieved cryptocurrency exchange Block Earner from its liability to pay a penalty for its breach of the Corporations Act despite an earlier ruling that it operated without a requisite financial services licence. The Court in earlier...

Australia’s prudential regulator has urged financial services businesses to maintain adequate data redundancy and disaster recovery processes after it observed weaknesses in regulated entities’ use and maintenance of backups. In a letter issued to all regulated entities on Monday, APRA’s...

Commercial artificial intelligence (AI) developer and regular partner to Australia’s big four banks Rich Data Co (RDC) has secured its first major contract with a US bank. The deal will see M&T Bank, North America’s sixth largest commercial bank, deploy...

NAB’s digital-only spinoff UBank has announced to customers it will from next month introduce interest rate tiers and increase the minimum deposit threshold for bonus interest rate eligibility as part of several changes to its general terms. From 1 July,...

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) will have its account validation service, NameCheck, embedded in global payments infrastructure, announcing it has become the first Australian bank to help validate bank account details used in international payments made to Australia. CBA’s...

Westpac is implementing a push notification service that alerts customers when they are not meeting the conditions to earn bonus interest on their Westpac savings account. Westpac said the feature, which sends notifications via both its mobile app and email,...

A class action lawsuit has been filed against insurance group IAG for its alleged failure, over multiple years, to provide promised loyalty discounts to customers. The suit, filed in Victoria’s Supreme Court, accuses several insurers within the IAG fold –...

Zurich’s Australia and New Zealand arm has concluded a six-month pilot with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to test the viability of an artificial intelligence (AI) model in overcoming a major hurdle within the life insurance underwriting process. The...

An in-house developed generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) capability built by ASIC to summarise public submissions was shelved immediately after a pilot experiment, senior staff  revealed during a senate inquiry on Tuesday, after the machine outputs were deemed inferior to human-generated...

Recently appointed Beyond Bank chief information officer (CIO) and big four bank alum Stevie-Ann Dovico has called for banks to replicate Netflix-style personalised profiles within their apps and online banking services. Such a capability, she said, would recognise the multiple,...

A future of ‘ambient’, branchless and even app-less retail banking is inevitable, according to ex-Westpac Group COO and Nano Platform co-founder and current chief executive Andrew Walker, who predicts that the traditional banking franchise is already on the verge of...

Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) chair Joe Longo has quietly expressed concerns over deficiencies within Australian regulators to effectively regulate emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Joining a featured regulator-only panel session at the ASIC/UTS co-hosted AI Regulators Symposium on...

The Commonwealth Bank’s (CBA’s) efforts to stamp out technology-facilitated abuse have received high praise from eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who singled out the bank’s anti-abuse AI tool as a model of best practice. Speaking at the ASIC/UTS co-hosted AI...