A new review set to land tomorrow will open a fresh front on the payments battleground before merchants and the industry have recovered from the interchange and surcharge shock.

Merchants must lock in post-surcharging deals from 1 October, but the fee data that would tell them whether they are paying too much does not arrive until April 2027 and even then, will not provide full transparency.

A $3 million Revolut zombie fraud incident appears to have accelerated an upgrade of PayTo, with a meeting of the industry’s top brass demanding the urgent fix to the fraud liability framework and the blocking of new risky merchants until the issue is resolved.

Ahead of the publication of new interchange rates and “no surcharge” rules being imposed on October 1, acquirers are suddenly overflowing with bonus gift cards, fee free periods and soon-to-be-redundant “zero cost EFTPOS” offers. To say that the payments market is in a state of chaos would be an understatement.

Payments was the clear winner at this year’s Finnies, with Hello Clever dominating the night, while Zepto and Remitly also took out major awards.

On The Interchange Bench this week, Cuscal installs one of its own - Michael Blomfield - to lead Paymark, Fiserv loses another CEO as Mike Lyons quits, Tyro’s Nigel Lee takes rough out of the boardroom, ING joins industry confusion on surcharging rules for October 1, De Angelis warns of end of FY scams, BankVic dumps cheques and Pestana joins Stripe.

The Reserve Bank's new RITS assessment drops governance to "partly observed", admits the post-2022 clean-up is running slow, and concedes the system will miss a reliability target it set for itself.

As the clock ticks down on Payday Super and the closure of the ATO's small business clearing house, QuickBooks has turned to Employment Hero to help automate compliance for thousands of Australian businesses.

From a single ATM transaction to processing almost 200 million payments worth $30 billion a year, EFTEX is celebrating 25 years as one of the quiet achievers of Australia's payments industry.

In an increasingly complex world of AI commerce, Adyen is trying to build solutions that enable merchants to transact and communicate fluently across multiple platforms.

NAB has unveiled a new around-the-clock operations hub that brings together cyber, fraud, payments and security teams as Australian banks confront increasingly sophisticated AI-powered scams and cyber attacks.

Australia’s largest bank has split its technology leadership into two executive roles, placing artificial intelligence, engineering and digital delivery at the centre of its retail banking strategy in which payments play a huge role.

The Federal Court says failures by the Australian arm of London-based banking giant HSBC to protect scam victims were serious and systemic, imposing a $35 million penalty in one of the strongest regulatory actions yet against an Australian bank over scam-related misconduct.