Aussie banks are struggling to compete with easy to use and fee-heavy plugins and apps in Australia’s fastest growing payment category - online - as talk of a Stripe takeover of PayPal and Block jobs shedding floods the market.

Westpac-backed rewards and cashback platform, ShopBack has announced it is walking away from its instore QR payments product ShopBack Pay, only a year after announcing a partnership with Chemist Warehouse and Banked.

While “numerous” developers have been allowed to work on Apple’s prized NFC chip in Australia, the tech giant has told a parliamentary inquiry that a new payments app is yet to emerge.

Australia's parliamentary payments inquiry stripped back the complexity to expose three uncomfortable truths: small businesses are subsidising the system, fintechs want exemptions that would make it worse, and Apple won't even say what it charges.

With the Reserve Bank set to make its final decision on merchant fees and surcharging tomorrow, the big bank lobby has flagged an alternative to banning credit card surcharging which involves the introduction of credit surcharge caps.

BNPL player Zip now heavily dependent on US business and like Beforepay, it is struggling to impress investors.

On The Interchange Bench this week Shane Healey takes the baton from Paul Askew on the AP+ Board, Greg Smith goes Global with eCommerce products, Block locals take stock after Jack Dorsey’s jobs slashing, Danvers job board provides options for payments nerds looking for work and there’s also work at in Cuscal’s strategy team, Visa’s David Peacock to Auckland and Westpac gets a new Payments leader in Andrew Kulmann.

Australia's loyalty landscape is being redrawn by regulatory pressure, cost-of-living anxiety and a retail data goldrush where every payment is a data point that’s sold and shared.

Last week I spent two days watching the parade of banking and payment seniors strut their stuff in Canberra at the House Economics Committee – the ParliPay hearings.

Australia’s goals to speed up and reduce the cost of cross-border payments are behind schedule, with banks usually proving more expensive than some fintechs to send money overseas.

Australian Payments Plus (AP+) is harmonising its New Payments Platform (NPP) push payments offering by merging the Single Credit Transfer (STC) and Osko services into one.

Australian B2B payments platform Lessn has celebrated surpassing $100 million transacted on its platform within its first year of operations, as it enters a new investment round.

Airwallex continues its sporting campaign march, this time onto the oval with the Bombers, despite AUSTRAC woes.