Four largest Australian banks want to boycott Apple Pay

During the first 10 days of the Apple Pay service in Russia, 125 thousand Mastercard card holders started using it. The owners of these cards were the first to get the opportunity to evaluate the new service, Kommersant writes . Over time, the service will be available to owners of other Sberbank cards. Among them, about a million people use smartphones based on iOS.

But in Australia, Apple Pay is not welcome. The four largest Australian banks want to boycott Apple. They applied to the local Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.
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Representatives of banks Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank, and Westpac compiled a document of 137 pages. In the document, they convince the public that Apple has taken an uncompromising position about the arrival of the payment system in the country.

The company is closed to cooperation and is trying to single-handedly benefit from its service, having acquired a ready-to-use and smoothly running contactless payment infrastructure. Banks emphasize that this infrastructure was not created by Apple, but by the players in the banking services market in Australia. And therefore they do not want the “invaders” to reap the fruits of their labor.

According to Apple, Australian banks are slowing innovation.

The platform is “closed” in order to provide protection against all kinds of cyber threats and failures in making payments, the company explains. "We can provide the highest level of security," Apple said.

People choose Apple Pay as a more efficient payment method than a card payment. But Apple Pay does exert a lot of pressure on traditional market participants - international payment systems and banks. “For them, this is a dangerous situation, because it turns out that banks themselves are leading the hand of their customers at Apple. This is a shame, because banks and MPS did all the work, invested in infrastructure, but were late in terms of developing their own mobile payment instruments, without giving them the necessary attention, ” says Kommersant.

However, the American company is not the first time entering new markets and trying to change the order established in the industry. Whether it will be perceived as a destroyer or a creator depends on the behavior of all three parties, including government regulators.

The Commission will review the complaint of banks and within a month will decide whether to declare Apple a boycott.