ASIC’s Greg Medcraft lashes bank ‘oligopoly’

Chairman of the corporate watchdog Greg Medcraft lashed out at the banking “oligopoly” for chipping away at customer trust with sector-wide interest rate hikes out-of-cycle with the Reserve Bank of Australia.

“I think every time you do an out-of-cycle increase you chip away that trust,” Mr Medcraft said. “It’s an oligopoly. It’s an oligopoly … you have price leadership and basically everyone else follows,” he told a banking and wealth summit in Sydney on Thursday.

“International investors used to say to me with incredulity, they say ‘the banks can just charge whatever they want?’ Yep, that’s the way it works in Australia.”

Read the whole story in The Australian.

Despite the deteriorating trust in the big financial institutions, the majority of Australians continue to bank with the big four. This is partly because the barriers of entry for new competitors are high, but also because many customers are too lazy or afraid to make the switch to a lender they do not know much about and don't expect to get any better treatment.

Amid all this criticism, the good news is that while fintech startups struggle with the challenge of changing the costly habits of Australians when it comes to the big banks, the disrupters are outing the big banks as costly, slow and opaque in their practices.

When it comes to sending payments internationally, one such disruptor is Flash Payments, a state of the art foreign exchange transfer payment provider.

This Australian startup was designed from the ground up to outperform traditional financial institutions by providing fast, secure and very affordable foreign exchange conversion services as an alternative to the existing opaque, siloed and inefficient banking networks. And it does so without the hidden fees typically imposed by the banks.

Using the innovative Ripple technology platform and XRP, Ripple's digital currency, Flash Payments delivers extraordinary transparency, speed and transactional control to users, setting a new level of service standard.

At Flash Payments we enable users to select the transfer date; pick the rate; send funds like an email; track transfers like a package; all without any surprise charges. There are none.

This is in stark contrast to the banks, where global payments cost more, take more time, and the routeing is opaque.

So, whether you are a business or an individual you can now skip the banks and take control of your foreign exchange transfers.

Learn more about Flash Payments and sign-up to benefit from their cutting-edge technology, great rates, transparency and control.