At its meeting today, the Payments System Board discussed a number of issues, including:
and retail payment service providers have continued to cope well with the operational challenges posed
by the pandemic. Financial market infrastructures have also continued to perform well in recent
months.
Stability Standards. The Board approved the Bank’s 2020 assessment, which will be published after
it has been provided to the Treasurer and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
in several areas. The Board discussed preliminary proposals for improving price transparency in the
merchant acquiring market. The Bank is planning to step up consultation with stakeholders with a view
to formally restarting the Review in the next few months.
potential implications of declining cash use for the provision of cash distribution services by banks
and other market participants. There has been further rationalisation of ATM fleets by some banks and
other deployers during the past year, as well as moves by some participants to establish ATM utilities.
Members noted the importance of the community continuing to have good access to cash withdrawal and
deposit services, even as the overall use of cash for transactions declines.
Consistent with previous discussions, members considered that at present there is not a strong
public-policy case for issuance in Australia, given that the electronic payments system in Australia
compares very favourably with those in many other countries and access to cash remains good.
Nonetheless, the Board will continue to closely watch the experience of other jurisdictions. The Bank
is continuing to research the technological and policy implications of a wholesale form of CBDC and is
working to develop a proof-of-concept with external parties to explore aspects of wholesale CBDC,
building on research the Bank did in its Innovation Lab last year.
card-not-present (CNP) fraud losses in 2019. This was the first decline in eight years and occurred
even though there was continued strong growth in the use of cards. The Board welcomed the
industry’s efforts to tackle CNP fraud in recent years and encouraged participants to continue to
support the AusPayNet-administered CNP Fraud Mitigation Framework that was introduced in 2019 as well
as other fraud detection and prevention initiatives.
resilience, including the Government’s Australian Cyber Security Strategy 2020, its consultation
to uplift security and resilience of critical infrastructure and the Council of Financial
Regulators’ framework for testing the strength of institutions’ cyber resilience.
The Board is meeting this afternoon with the Australian Payments Council.
