The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has been warned that introducing regulation is not likely to encourage funding for new mobile payment technologies. Regulatory intervention “is unlikely to be helpful in stimulating investment”, argues Westpac, one of Australia’s big four retail banks, in a submission to the RBA’s review of innovation in the country’s payments sector. In fact, new regulation could be detrimental, says the bank. “The risk here is that an intervention will saddle Australia with sub-optimal technology”.

The bank says “a lot of exploratory work is being done” to work out the best way to offer mobile payments to users in a secure and reliable manner. “At this stage, we have not identified regulatory hurdles”, it says. In fact WestPac and its retail rivals are still working out which technology they like best through trials before moving towards commercial services. WestPac is conducting an internal trial of NFC stickers which customers could fix to their handsets. Meanwhile rival ANZ Bank told ZDNet Australia that a recent NFC trial, which involved putting NFC cases over conventional handsets, had disappointed.  However, another leading retail bank in the country, Commonwealth Bank, will launch a case-based NFC service over the next few months.