Banks must partner to win disruption battle
Colin Barnard, industry leader for finance at Google Australia, has some good news for the nation’s banks. “I don’t think Google ever really wants to become a bank,” he told The Australian Financial Review Banking and Wealth Summit in Sydney on Wednesday. But Mr Barnard also had a warning for financial services companies that believe they can see off the army of disrupters on their own. “You can partner and become rich, or you can be lonely and be poor, and eventually die,” he said. The sentiment was echoed by Helen Lorigan, who is an advisory board member of fintech start-ups HashChing and Investfit and is a venture partner of […]
Fintech licence exemption no huge difference
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s (ASIC’s) licensing exemption for fintech providers to test certain services will not make a material difference to those who want to build a scaled advice engine as they will attain a licence regardless of the exemption, according to Rubik. General manager of wealth solutions, Cameron O’Sullivan, said there was a fine line between advice and client engagement tools. Some providers would simply want to build a series of tools for clients to engage with before the first meeting with the adviser, which would have traditionally been the online fact find. “But they might now have some basic engagement tools in there too with the […]
Crowdfunder signs-off on world-first ag land acquisition deal
THE crowd-funder which made headlines last year when it tried to mount a bid to buy S.Kidman & Co during the pastoral giant’s torturous path to sale has made its first rural property purchase – albeit on a much more modest scale. Crowd-funder DomaCom has finalised its first foray into agricultural assets with a ground-breaking deal that gives 90 smaller retail investors a stake in a high performance grazing property in Victoria’s prime Western Districts. The 150-hectare property, Doyles, just outside Casterton near the South Australian border, is in the undulating heartland of the prime beef and sheep region. Before entering a contract to purchase the property, the fund was […]
Fintech no threat yet to big banks: ACCC
The hopes are high that a wave of new fintech players will shake up the big banks and get a better outcome for customers. But we’re not seeing it yet, according to the competition watchdog. “There’s been a lot of talk [about fintech] but not much really happening,” Rod Sims, the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, said at The Australian Financial Review Banking and Wealth Summit. “Let’s hope something does … nothing is happening that is changing the playing field very much.” The role of the ACCC in creating a more competitive landscape in banking has become a hot button issue. A parliamentary inquiry into banking pointed to a regulator […]
Fintech Down Under
Cameron Dart is the CEO of International Fintech, a hub that connects Australian fintech companies to the rest of the world and vice versa. The company recently opened a London “launch pad” office that helps Australian startups expand globally and links startups in other countries to the Australian market. To help shed light on the state of Australian fintech, Benzinga caught up with Cameron Dart for a Q&A about innovation and how fintech solves problems for Australian users. Q&A With Cameron Dart What’s the general “lay of the land” of Australian fintech? The Australian fintech industry as a whole is in its infancy compared to the United States and the […]
Bitcoin spikes after Japan says it’s a legal payment method
Bitcoin trades up 2.8% at $1,133 a coin as of 7:08 a.m. ET on Monday. The cryptocurrency’s gains come after Japan announced on Friday that bitcoin would be accepted as a legal payment method beginning on April 1, 2017. It’s the first bit of good news for bitcoin in quite some time. Recent chatter in the market has centered around developers threatening a “hard fork” that would split the currency in two. Additionally, the US Securities and Exchange Commission rejected two bitcoin ETFs in March, saying that it did not find the proposals “to be consistent with Section 6(b)(5) of the Exchange Act, which requires, among other things, that the […]
ACCC says Apple Pay will boost card competition
Apple Pay’s ability to toggle through different payment cards was seen as pro-competitive by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and became one of the key factors leading the regulator to favour Apple over the banks. In an interview with The Australian Financial Review after the ACCC knocked back an application by the banks to collectively negotiate with Apple over access to the iPhone’s “near field communication” (NFC) controller, ACCC chairman Rod Sims said the banks’ arguments that such access could increase competition for digital wallets were “strong” – but the regulator always has to be cautious about intervening in markets. At a time when the industry is looking for […]
The ‘booming’ NSW economy that 100,000 people have joined
Growing use of services such Uber and Airbnb has led to a billion-dollar increase in the size of the so-called sharing or collaborative economy in NSW over the past year, a new study has found. The sale of goods and services via peer-to-peer technologies generated $2.6 billion in revenue for the NSW economy last year, recording growth of nearly 70 per cent, according to the research from Deloitte Access Economics commissioned by the finance department. The number of people in NSW earning an income from businesses that are part of what the state government calls the collaborative economy has nearly doubled over the past 12 months to reach 92,400, the […]
