Financial Services

The banking industry's peak body, the Australian Banking Association (ABA), has urged staff across the sector to make use of the controversial contact tracing app, COVIDSafe, praising the Government’s strategy to lift coronavirus lockdowns and reboot the country's economy.
 

In the thick of the bank’s Covid-19 response strategy revealed in its half-year report, the National Australia Bank has announced a revamp of its executive team, appointing NAB veteran Nathan Goonan and Rachel Slade to new executive positions.
 

TransferWise, an emerging global giant in cross-border payments, is set to deploy Mambu’s cloud-native banking platform as part of its core infrastructure.
 

Bankwest has formed a “digital banking task force” to assist older, less tech-savvy customers bank safely from home amid coronavirus restrictions.
 

The financial services watchdog has released a new reporting standard requiring regular submissions of financial data from institutions partaking in the Commonwealth’s Coronavirus Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Guarantee Scheme, created to ease SME cashflow pressures resulting from Covid-19 shutdowns.
 

Swift, the global banking standards body and host of one of the world's largest financial technology expositions, sibos, has cancelled the event in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
 

APRA has offered some reprieve for stressed financial institutions bearing the brunt of Covid-19-related shutdowns, allowing for a six-month deferral in implementing an amendment to the CPS 234 Information Security standard.
 

A month on from WHO’s official declaration of a global pandemic, and as corporate shutdowns grind the Australian economy to a halt, customer claims through CommBank’s digital Benefits Finder service have doubled.
 

Following a successful proof of concept with 17 domestic businesses, Australian e-payments service eftpos has announced it will begin official trials of its Digital Identity solution in a bid to reduce bank fraud and spur fintech innovation.
 

More than $1 billion will be set aside by Westpac to help manage the fallout from its alleged breaches of the AML/CTF Act, with $130 million allocated to help rejig the bank's financial crimes monitoring program and internal systems.
 

Standard Chartered chief executive Bill Winters has warned employees to stay off Zoom and Google Hangouts as concerns mount over security vulnerabilities within the popular teleconferencing platforms, news service Reuters reports.
 

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has warned FSIs and regulatory bodies not to take their eyes off the ball as criminals exploit gaps in national anti-money laundering/counterterrorism financing (AML/CTF) exposed during the Covid-19 panic.
 

Despite continuing market volatility in response to the coronavirus pandemic, digital-only challenger bank 86 400 pulled off an impressive $34 million capital raising effort last month, completing its $90 million Series A equity funding round.
 

Industry watchdog APRA has suspended the issuance of new operating licences for at least six months as it responds to the economic fallout of Covid-19.
 

In an effort to lower Covid-19 transmission risks, Australia’s payments industry has agreed to temporarily increase the contactless payment transaction limit from $100 to $200, reducing consumers' need to physically contact payment terminals.