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The Australian Payments Clearing Association says it will decide later this month whether the country's payments industry has made progress in offering consumers more choices for online payments. The association, which is owned by financial institutions and sets rules for clearing and settlement of payments, hopes to release its final decision on 21 Aug., according to a statement this week from the group. The association's actions follow a threat earlier this year from the Reserve Bank of Australia, the country's central bank, that it might use its regulatory powers to force more standardization and innovation in the country's electronic-payments infrastructure (CardLine Global, 26 March). Australia's electronic-payment system "has essentially remained unchanged since its establishment in the 1980s," Glenn Stevens, the central bank's governor, said during a speech at the time. "Left to their own devices, [payment] networks may stop short of an efficient level of cooperation," Stevens said. "Incomplete standardization may result." Problems Stevens identified include a lack of standards that enable point-of-sale systems to communicate with each other and payment networks that cannot easily "send payments into consumers' accounts in real time." Since then, the Australian payments industry has launched a retail debit card system for online shopping, the clearing association says. Australian financial regulators might have a difficult time imposing new online-payment schemes without a clear commercial framework, Matthew Sinclair, executive director with Australia-based Carpadium Consulting, tells CardLine Global. "The regulator will make some noise," he says. "However, my strong suspicion is that there will not be too much actual change in the way the banks operate, at least in the short term."
