The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is calling for the country's payments industry players to coordinate on system-wide innovation.
RBA rejects crypto as means of payment
The RBA’s assistant governor has reiterated the view cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have no place for making payments in the future.
Sky News Business Editor Ross Greenwood says Michele Bullock came out at a payments conference and effectively said she will not call Bitcoin cryptocurrencies because she “doesn’t believe that they’re currency”.
“Crypto assets is what she calls them and, so, as a result, she’s also saying not only are they highly volatile and people could lose money from them, but she doesn’t ever believe that they will have any part in terms of actual payments,” Mr Greenwood said.
“The one thing she does say though is that central banks themselves could issue their own stable coins as they’re sometimes called.”
Reserve Bank of Australia Says Case for Big Rate Hikes ‘Diminished’
Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Philip Lowe said the case for outsized interest-rate increases has “diminished.” Lowe also said the central bank will debate the merits of hiking by a quarter-percentage point or a half-point at its Oct. 4 meeting in response to Australian lawmakers’ questions in semi-annual testimony. (Excerpt)
RBA Staff Saw 20% Housing Drop
Internal documents show a warning to Australia’s central bank on home prices may have led to the RBA breaking ranks with the international counterparts to slow the pace of rate increases. Swati Pandey reports on Bloomberg Television. ——– Follow Bloomberg for business news & analysis, up-to-the-minute market data, features, profiles and more: http://www.bloomberg.com Connect with us on… Twitter: https://twitter.com/business Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bloombergbusiness Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bloombergbusiness/
RBA tipped to raise interest rates
The Reserve Bank is being tipped to lift interest rates for the eighth straight month at its final board meeting of the year.
An expected 25 basis point rise would take the cash rate to 3.1 per cent – the highest level in over a decade.
Need for Speed: How Real-Time Rail (RTR) will change the fintech game
For the second Fintech Drinks of 2021, we are excited to discuss a major technological improvement in the payments space called Real-Time Rails (RTR).
Leading up to the Payment’s Summit by Payments Canada, we will be discussing how the implementation of RTR will impact different stakeholders and opportunities that this presents for the ecosystem.
Real-time Payments (RTP) Guide Episode 8: Partners, Peers, and Technology
See our 2019 RTP Readiness Report: https://bit.ly/2VpEBSB
This video is Episode 8 in a series that covers real-time payments strategy and how smaller financial institutions can capitalize on the opportunity it provides.
See the RTP vlog series in its entirety here: https://bit.ly/2Uas2Oo
Throughout the series we’ll provide answers to frequently asked questions, like whether RTP should be an immediate or long-term roadmap item, what are the main decision points, how to navigate with limited resources and funding, what should be involved in vendor analysis, how to get started with real-time payments, and much more.
This episode focuses on partners, peers, and technology considerations.
Look outside of your organization. There are plenty of people to talk to. The first one is TCH. They’ve got a great team. They’ve got plenty of people who can support you, help you with your product ideas, help you with challenges you’re facing, help you solve technical difficulties, help you with looking at vendors. They can do all of these things for you. Don’t fail to seize that partner that’s in front of you. Leverage them completely.
There are also your other competing financial institutions. While you’re competitors, you also have to realize that the success for RTP is dependent on ubiquity and all banks adopting it. There’s opportunities for you to help each other by sharing challenges you’ve faced, how you worked through a particular question. For example, how some banks can talk to each other about how they adapted to real-time fraud analysis, particularly as a sending institution. Learn from each other and what challenges you faced and how you tried to solve those.
Lastly, your greatest partner is going to be your technology partner. You need to make sure you include them from the very beginning. RTP will change everything with how technology functions within your institution. You need to be looking at what systems you have, which ones are vendors versus which ones are internal, as well as how you can communicate with those systems. For example, your fraud system. Does it have some sort of API interface? Or your operations systems, do those have some sort of API interface? You need to look at all of these things and if you don’t have these capabilities, then you need to build them. The only way to discover these early on is by including technology and impressing upon them the breadth of the potential of change here and making sure they’re helping you think through everything.
Real-time Payments Architecture Guide Episode 2: RTP vs ACH Integration Differences
See our 2019 RTP Readiness Report: https://bit.ly/2VpEBSB
See our RTP architecture vlog in its entirety: https://www.levvel.io/blog/real-time-payments-architecture
See our RTP product and design vlog in its entirety: https://bit.ly/2wus5pL
See our RTP strategy vlog in its entirety: https://bit.ly/2Uas2Oo
If you’re a bank looking to integrate with RTP, you should be aware of some of the biggest differences between RTP and another payment type such as ACH. The three differences I want to highlight are first moving from batch-based processing to real-time. Second, real-time payments are irrevocable. And third, RTP is a credit push only system.
First, one of the biggest shifts in integrating with RTP, versus another payment type such as ACH, is the move from batch-based processing to real-time processing. So this is a shift that’s not unique to financial institutions in RTP. It’s really happening across many different industries and domains, and it’s occurring because customers continue to expect more and more of their interactions to be real-time.
So from smart speakers to social media, to video streaming services, customers expect systems to be up 24/7 and to be responsive. Banking is not immune to this expectation.
A second big difference between RTP versus ACH is the fact that real-time payments are irrevocable. This means that once the money is sent and both the participating FIs accept and acknowledge the credit transfer, the money moves, and there is no concept of a reversal. This is a different paradigm and takes some getting used to, but it also has some advantages of removing the complexity of things like reversals.
A third key difference between RTP and ACH is that RTP is a credit push only system, so there’s no equivalent of an ACH debit. This, again, has its tradeoffs, but it puts more control back into the customer’s hands.
