Yesterday’s glossy, spin-doctored RBA announcement felt more like a corporate launch than a regulatory decision, complete with case studies, vox pops and puffed up stats to back in the central bank’s long-awaited decision. But while the banks, the ACCC and US card schemes were celebrating their lobbying efforts on interchange relief and surcharging bans, small businesses were considering how much they will need to lift prices to deal with the thousands of dollars in extra fees they will need to pay come October.

A wide range of businesses and small business groups are convinced that the RBA has kicked an own goal on inflation with an April Fool’s joke that is not funny.

Following the Reserve Bank’s no surcharge decision, a gaggle of well-known fintechs including Zeller, Shift4, Zero, PayNuts, Square and Tyro may need to rebuild their business models and, in some cases, technology stacks, or risk losing massive market share back to the big banks.

Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ and NAB are among the industry players who may need to tip more money into their “underutilised critical infrastructure” to finally unlock the power of resilience, trust and real time payments in Australia.

While the increasingly pervasive US payments platform Stripe was busy announcing a new Sydney engineering hub in early March, Australia's biggest bank was quietly assembling the parts to compete with it head-on.

Fresh from its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure player BVNK, Mastercard now has its eye on Australia’s account-to-account market as it continues to expand its global tentacles into new forms of payments. And, as usual, Visa is joining the party.

About 90,000 new entities including property settlement monopoly PEXA, brokers, accounts, lawyers will fall under AUSTRAC compliance from July - as PEXA eyes the New Payments Platform.

Brad Jones laid out a roadmap for tokenised money and assets at the Australian Payments Plus Beyond Tomorrow conference. The message to industry: we've kicked the tyres, we know what works, the clock is ticking and we have a lot to do.

Binance Australia is having a bad year. After being unplugged after a short stint riding the Australian financial system via Bolt Group and Banking Circle, the company has now been fined $10 million for exposing its customers to high risk crypto products without protection and is still under an AUSTRAC investigation.

Australia's Reserve Bank will ban business from surcharging the cost of card transactions from October 1, all whilst the rest of the world grapples with reducing the impact of high merchant fees on small businesses.

On The Interchange Bench this week, James Kozik gets the top job at Zai, NZ joins US in axing surcharge bans as RBA does the opposite, the PSP formerly known as Smartpay - Shift4 - releases results, Zero’s Lucius Orsini may need a rebrand, Zeller follows ANZ Worldline with Discover and Diners upgrade, and notorious PayDay News columnist and IPF co-founder Brad Kelly gets a gong.