No need for national digital dollars: RBA
The Reserve Bank of Australia and a global investment bank say the speed of payments innovation will fend off any threat from cryptocurrencies, and creating digitised versions of central bank money will make bank runs much more likely during a crisis. After last year’s speculative bitcoin bubble, the potential for the Australian central bank to issue digital dollars to allow money to move through distributed ledgers is fading. RBA assistant governor Michelle Bullock told a global audience at Sibos that while it’s still open to considering wholesale applications for a digital Australian dollar, it hasn’t yet been convinced of the need to create one, and the RBA does not want […]
Melbourne Fintech to disrupt the way young Australians travel
Melbourne Fintech Pelikin is on the cusp of disrupting the Australian travel money market with its mobile-only multi-currency account and prepaid Visa card. The young team is on a mission to make “travel brighter” for young Australians by providing them with valuable travel and money services that have been built with their best interests first. At its core, the Pelikin app and card will allow users to hold up to five different currencies at once and spend in over 200 countries across the world in an easy, affordable way. Last month, Pelikin released its prepaid card and with a unique vertical and neon yellow design, it’s a far cry from […]
ASX-listed Peppermint Innovation registers more than 5,000 Bizmoto agents in the Philippines
Peppermint Innovation Limited announces that to date more than 5,000 agents have signed up to its Bizmoto network in the Philippines. Having launched the Bizmoto agent network in late May followed by a preliminary digital marketing drive which started on August 23, the Philippines operations team had registered 5,000 Bizmoto agents as of the end of last week. The agents are now being on-boarded and trained in how to deliver the various Bizmoto services, including mobile banking, mobile eLoad, bill/product payment and money transfers. They also receive training on how to charge and recharge their electronic wallets, which they use to facilitate Bizmoto services. At present, Filipinos can use their […]
DriveWealth partners with Verrency to offer consumers access to a new savings and investing strategy
Digital brokerage solution provider DriveWealth has joined forces with Australian global payments innovator Verrency. The partnership will enable DriveWealth to deliver its ground-breaking fractional share investment platform to a new segment of consumers. As a result of the agreement between the two companies signed today at Money20/20 in Las Vegas, shoppers who have a debit or credit card will have the opportunity to seamlessly invest in companies from which they purchase goods and services. For example, if you buy shoes from the Nike store, you can elect to round up or put a percentage of the purchase price towards buying shares, or a fraction of a share, in the company. […]
Irish FinTech company PerfectCard confirms its sale to Australia’s EML for €6m
Irish FinTech company PerfectCard has been sold to Australian payment solutions provider EML Payments in a €6m (A$9.5m) deal. PerfectCard provides incentive and corporate expense solutions including PerfectIncentive and the recently-launched Pecan Expense. The acquisition will result in the expansion of PerfectCard in Ireland, with plans to increase the number of full-time employees over the next few years, the company said. Under the deal EML has acquired 75pc of PerfectCard, having received Central Bank approval for the transaction in the past two weeks. Commenting on the announcement, Nikki Evans, CEO of PerfectCard, described it as an important move for both companies. “It allows EML to self-issue regulated payment products across […]
Westpac launches ‘designer’ wearable payments accessories
The bank has made payment-enabled keychains, silicon tags, and some pins available, but there’s still no sign of Apple Pay. Westpac has announced the availability of “Centsitive Objects” on Wednesday, touted by the bank as a range of “designer” wearable payment-enabled accessories. Instead of just plugging into devices manufactured by others, Westpac launched its own range of wearable, hands-free, and battery-free payment accessories in October. The new range designed by Sydney-based entrepreneur Hayden Cox builds on the bank’s PayWear wearable payments play. According to Cox, his designs are ideally shaped for customers that want a payments device with a “little more flavour”. “Our customers are increasingly on-the-go with more than […]
Cross-border payments set for ‘unprecedented change’
The cross-border payments industry is seeing levels of “unprecedented change” globally, including in regulation, where Australia is struggling to keep apace despite the competition watchdog’s probe into the $9 billion foreign currency transaction market. That’s the view of OFX chief executive Skander Malcolm who identifies three themes dominating cross-border payment, including that a larger number of small and medium businesses are utilising global payments to tap into new customers or for their supply chain, and that rapid technological change is spawning a rash of new products and services. He says the third trend is a higher level of regulatory scrutiny and change that is facilitating new models, an area where […]
New ‘sandbox’ to help fintechs compete for real-time payments
Start-ups seeking to develop services for the new, real-time payments system will be able to test their capabilities via a new “sandbox” created by its governing body NPP Australia and Swift, the network of global banks that helped build the infrastructure. The new test environment – which will allow connections with the “new payments platform” (NPP) via “application programming interfaces” (APIs) – comes after criticism from the Productivity Commission in August that access to the big bank-built system is inadequate. To encourage more competition, NPP Australia introduced a new “NPP API Framework” earlier this month. Its CEO, Adrian Lovney, said the NPP has been designed to be inclusive and “open […]
