The Commonwealth Government has announced a review of the regulatory architecture of the Australian payments system. The review is to ensure the payments system remains fit for purpose and is capable of supporting innovation for the benefit of businesses and consumers. The review is to provide a report to the Government by April 2021. Background.

Separately the Reserve Bank has released the annual report for 2020 of the Payments System Board.

The Report highlights:

• the decline in the use of cash for consumer payments, with households increasingly choosing to use electronic payment methods. The pandemic has accelerated this shift, with the increased use of contactless card payments and online payments.
• It has actively encouraged acquirers to provide merchants with functionality for least-cost routing (LCR) of contactless debit card transactions as a way to increase competition and hold down payment costs.
• Data collected by the Bank indicate a significant increase in the frequency and duration of retail payments outages in recent years. To promote improved reliability in retail payments services, the Bank began working with the industry in late 2019 to enhance its quarterly data collection for retail payments incidents, and develop a standard set of statistics on operational outages to be publicly disclosed by individual institutions.

The Board is considering a wide range of policy issues in the context of its Review of Retail Payments Regulation.

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