Payments experts and small business groups have delivered mixed responses to the findings of the Reserve Bank’s retail payments review, characterising some of the proposed reforms as potentially inconsistent or “too modest”.
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9 Mar, 2021 Author Ranina Sanglap
Australia s buy-now-pay-later players may need more regulation to protect customers after the point-of-sale credit industry has grown rapidly in recent years, helped in part by an absence of oversight, experts say.
Companies such as Afterpay Ltd., Zip Co. Ltd. and Brighte Capital Pty. Ltd. have attracted droves of consumers, especially younger buyers on e-commerce platforms, by allowing them to pay for their purchases in installments and not charging them interest. That has also led to criticism of their lending practices, mainly from customers being charged heavy late fees.
Buy-now-pay-later, or BNPL, players have so far avoided regulation as provisions of the Australian National Consumer Credit Protection Act of 2009 do not apply to certain types of loans, including interest-free credit for a short term. The industry adopted a code of conduct for self-regulation from Mar
Global giant PayPal is set to take on Afterpay and Zip on their home turf, in a sign of the growing competition in the fast-growing buy now, pay later sector.
Normally the ACCC would be expected to tap the RBA’s expertise to assess the merits of any planned merger in the payments market, but that practice might have to be shelved when it comes to a merger application expected to be submitted today.
Eftpos expedites QR code rollout
Eftpos expedites QR code rollout
25 February 2021 5:50AM
Eftpos Australia will begin piloting a new Quick Response (QR) code payments platform in June, with a view to launching a national multi-channel transaction network next year.
Community acceptance of QR codes in the payments process has grown slowly in Australia compared to other Asian countries, but research indicates that it has increased during COVID-induced lockdowns in the last year.
While Eftpos is set to be the first payments scheme to roll out QR code functionality in the domestic market, global payments providers such as Mastercard and Visa are likely to follow.