Fintech 2025

AUSTRALIA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Charmian Holmes, Jaime Lumsden, Michele Levine and Jessica Smith, Hamilton Locke

Climate reporting and risks As of 1 January 2025, many large Australian businesses and financial institutions must pre - pare annual sustainability reports on manda - tory climate-related financial disclosures. This requirement arises from the passing of the Treas - ury Laws Amendment (Financial Market Infra - structure and Other Measures) Bill 2024 (Cth) through parliament in September 2024, which amended the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) (Cor - porations Act) to introduce these new measures. Given the maturing size and scale of the fintech market, a number of fintechs in Australia will be required to comply with these new obligations. Further, over the past 18 months or so, ASIC and the ACCC have focused on climate risk and greenwashing as part of its regulatory enforce - ment priorities, with a number of cases relating to greenwashing amongst household names. Capital markets ASIC released a discussion paper titled “Austral- ia’s evolving capital markets: A discussion paper on the dynamics between public and private markets” following a 2024 taskforce established to explore the need for additional regulation in private markets. ASIC poses questions designed to deepen and sharpen its understanding of how Australia’s capital markets operate, in particular, how to balance the dual goals of ensuring private and public capital markets are open, accessible and support economic growth, while protecting against risks. It will be interesting to see how this plays out given the interest in secondary trading and pri - vate credit at both a wholesale and individual consumer level (especially given the yield vs risk profile of the fintech industry).

CDR reinvigoration Late last year, the Australian government announced a series of changes to the Consum - er Data Right (CDR) that are intended to rein - vigorate and encourage further uptake among consumers and remove barriers to data sharing between banks and fintechs. This follows a lack - lustre initial rollout of the required changes by banks and other financial institutions in response to CDR’s first phase launch. The changes include adding functionality to bun - dle consents, enabling consumers to provide multiple consents through a single action point and removing barriers for banks by simplifying the requirements that apply when an accredited bank seeks data from a consumer. These changes followed the Australian Bank - ing Association and Customer Owned Banking Association’s campaign against open banking which called for a halt to the CDR rollout and a pro-active counter-campaign by Fintech Aus - tralia to stay the course on CDR. Additionally, an exposure draft of laws proposing to amend the Competition and Consumer (Con - sumer Data Right) Rules 2020 (CDR Rules) was released 26 November 2024 to provide clarity on how the CDR Rules will apply to the non- bank lending sector and narrow the scope of CDR data for both the banking and non-bank lending sectors. New Technology Solutions PayTo PayTo was launched in Australia in 2023 to revolutionise payments to replace the outdated “BECS Direct Debit” systems and enable real- time transactions for recurring payments directly from customers’ bank accounts. However, its slow adoption has been blamed on high costs

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