Senate Economics Legislation Committee, , 2:44:22 to 2:49:25
Discussion on the extensive consultation process involving small and large businesses regarding the removal of card surcharging and reduction of merchant costs.
Topics: Integrity, Lobbying
Speakers: Michele Bullock, Senator Lisa Darmanin, Dr Brad Jones
Thank you very much. I'll kick off just with a couple. I wanted to talk about the um surcharging and merchant card payment costs. You touched on it just at the end of your opening statement there. Just wondering if you could uh you said in your opening statement that you undertook extensive consultation uh before coming to a decision. I was just wondering if you took talk a little bit more about um what that looked like. What does extensive mean? Who did you consult with over what time frame?
Um we have um a long standing process um of how we manage these consultations uh at the Reserve Bank. We've been doing them for uh decades now. Um what it involved was first of all publication of an issues paper at which we um gathered feedback. Um I can't recall what year that was in uh Brad, 2023.
Uh yeah.
Anyway, um I can find out the exact date. Um and then what happened was uh we gathered that and then we put out a consultation paper which set out our responses to the various issues that were raised, and that included interchange fees, surcharging, um, it also included scheme fees, um, and they were the main things that it included. And we set it out, set out what our regulatory response was proposed to be. And then the uh industry usually has uh at least a couple of months to respond to that and the public, so it's a very wide consultation. We publish all of the non-confidential submissions on our website, so you can go to our website and you can see all the responses. There are also some confidential submissions in those circumstances where we consult. That's because some organisations want to provide us with commercial and confidence information because it thinks it goes to the questions we're asking, so we keep those confidential, but we publish as much as we can. Um after that, um the payment system board considers those submissions and finalises its its its um its uh reforms. So that's the process it goes through. It's a lengthy process. Um for example, in the current process we're going through. I don't think we uh are going to have any proposed solutions until probably uh the middle of next year. So it's not a uh short process but it's a very extensive process.
So sorry, you said an issues paper in 2023 and then find out the extra 24 exact dates on the
list of the work.
So then you set out your regulatory responses and then a couple of months of consultation and then submissions received on your website. What sorts of groups of consultation did you cover? Like, did it include large business, small business? You said members of the public could submit, but what did the what did um your kind of targeted processes look like in terms of the types of organisations you reached out to?
Well, we reached we reached out to anyone who wanted to give us a submission, basically. Um I think if you um I'm just going on to the website to look, but I think if you look at um the you you will see that we get big business, small business, financial institutions, we got submissions, I think, from the public, the general public put in submissions. Uh, you may or may not recall that one of the things that was particularly prescient for the general public at the time was surcharging. Um, there was a lot of feedback uh we were getting both formally and informally from the general public that they did not like surcharging. Um that, you know, was very it was very broad. Anyone who wanted to engage, whether they be individual institutions or community organisations or business organisations, anyone was free to do so. Um I can't find it at the moment. How many submissions we got there? You might be able to find it, Brad.
But um it's probably just also worth adding on top of the formal submissions. Our teams took a large number of meetings uh at the bank from various associations, in fact, from a wide range of stakeholders to here directly extra context that perhaps they didn't want to put in a submission, so there was the formal submission component and then an extensive range of meetings added to that.
Thank you. Um, and thanks for that. That's useful. Um, and then uh can you just talk to us about who's on the payments system board who then ultimately made the decision post receiving all of the feedback through the consultation process?