[jpgvm]

Eh, maybe not in Australia. Remember Australia doesn't have like 5 million banks, we have essentially 4 big ones and they already are pretty cutting edge vs US/Canadian banks. i.e instant transfers are normalized, NFC is the norm, apps and Internet banking have been very good for about 10 years.

If the NFC chips were opened up through regulation I have zero doubt Australian banks would just say "we support contactless with our first party app" and that would be the end of that until Apple asked for a more reasonable cut.

When all your banks suck and Apple seems to be the only people with their shit together, sure but Australia doesn't live in that world.

[xvaier]

Canada has essentially 6 big banks, instant transfers using Interac has been the most common way of transferring money for years (it launched in 2003) and payment using NFC has been the norm for a decade.

[jpgvm]

Heh ok, sorry for assuming Canada would be as bad as the US.

[tonyarkles]

The mobile phone apps are probably just as bad, but e-transfers (Interac, EMT, whatever you want to call it) generally work pretty well. And they're still somewhat of a hassle compared to I guess Venmo or Cashapp or... I've never used those but they seem pretty slick in comparison to having to go into a banking app, set up an EMT Payee using email/phone number, set a password on the transaction, hope that they remember to cash the EMT before it expires, etc.

[FridgeSeal]

> When all your banks suck and Apple seems to be the only people with their shit together, sure but Australia doesn't live in that world.

ANZ was too busy charging dead people to bother implementing it. God only knows what westpac was up too, NAB had an implementation on Android, and having used it a bunch, it was _awful_ and I was glad when they gave up and just accepted the alternative. Combank did their own thing, and seemed the furthest along, but support seemed patchy and they ended up junking their solution anyways and going to Android/Apple pay anyways IIRC.

These places can hardly manage to maintain their own apps, I have about zero confidence in them deciding to wander off into the wilderness and trying again.

Not to mention, all the non-big-4, and all the smaller banks probably won’t bother with reimplementing NFC pay as they either don’t have the resources, or can’t rely on institutional-inertia to foist useless changes onto their customers.

[caf]

The CBA Android app supports contactless, or you can add your card to the Google wallet. It seems to work equivalently well (although the enrolling bit has less friction in CBAs own app).

[inkyoto]

> […] we have essentially 4 big ones and they already are pretty cutting edge […]

The Big Four are not the cutting edge, it is a delusion. Out of four, only the Commonwealth Wank has transitioned onto a modern core banking platform for retail banking. Business accounts still run on the legacy core banking platform, if my understanding is current and accurate.

The remaining ones are as backward (from the technology POV) as they have always been. Westpac acquired St George Bank in 2008 trumpeting their core banking platform as the reason for the acquisition and the intention to transition onto it. To the best of my knowledge, that has not happened as of 2024, and Westpac contunues to use its own legacy core banking platform disjointly from that of St George's. Moreover, banking is not even integrated between the two even today, and the St George core banking has fell into a state of disrepair – EFT's can take a few days to reach the receipient's account depending on the receipient's bank.

The actual – pretty much only – innovator is Macquarie Bank that has invested a lot into revamping their banking platform from the ground up, plus neo-banks – newcomers to the banking market albeit niche ones.

The Big Four (or, most banks in general) loathe technology and IT as they see both as a liability, not a competitive advantage, due to tech not being their core business and due to being run by old farts with ossified brains. And that was the reason why they started rapidly losing millenials, Gen Z and other young customers to neobanks. It was a wake-up call for them.

> […] instant transfers are normalized […]

… and it has nothing to do with the Big Four. The Big Four, in fact, sabotaged instant payments for many years due to a lack of interest to advance the payment technology, and the instant payments in Australia only succeeded at the third (or at the fourth – I have lost the count) attempt after the Reserve Bank held the Big Four at a gunpoint and threatened them with severe penalties if they pull out again, as they had done every single time before. Instant payments in Australia are done via NPP/Osco, an independent company set up by the RBA, a BPAY subsidiary, and the Big Four as well as other local banks are mere users of it. None of the four control NPP/Osco payments, and that is a very good thing.

> If the NFC chips were opened up through regulation I have zero doubt Australian banks would just say "we support contactless with our first party app" […]

… and users would be left with the atrocious quality banking apps and with banks tracking the users all the way down into the customer's colons.

User tracking was the actual reason behind the spat between the Big Four and Apple – the former wanted to get a way into users' smartphones and all sorts of device and chip ID's – to track the user behaviour to which Apple said no. As a customer, Apple's stance suits me way more.

Of course, banks have found other ways to track the iPhone users courtesy of advances in the big data science, although the attempt has been somewhat hampered. The Big Four are the largest employers of data scientists and for a reason.

You can't be naive and look at the Big Four through the rose tinted glasses – they are in the business of making very big money and treat their customers as acquisition assets and cows to milk. Commonwealth Wank has been onselling the transaction information to Equifax (other than reporting the credit history), and Equifax has been onselling that transaction information to some pretty shady loan shark companies.

[robertlagrant]

> and Westpac contunues to use its own legacy core banking platform disjointly from that of St George's

It's so difficult to do this stuff. I firmly believe they should just start a new tech-focused bank from the ground up, and transition customer to it gradually over the subsequent 10 years. Maintain 2 apps; shift to a new backend gradually. But I think it has to be in-house, and built with this in mind. Mergers don't work with banking tech.

Maybe they're already quietly doing this.

[jamesfinlayson]

Westpac has been saying just this week that their big transformation will be done in the next few years. I've never worked in banking but having seen some other big transformation projects in my career, I'm not optimistic.