The American marketing ploys of Halloween, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have pulled forward retail spending in Australia from the traditional Christmas/Boxing Day sales peak, but the big festive spend remains a key indicator of payments trends.
The rise of credit cards, then debit cards, ecommerce, tap’n’go and buy now, pay later were all first significantly evident in the early summer spendathons. This year’s data will be worth paying attention to on a couple of fronts: how big will the traditional post-Christmas hangover of financial stress be? And what role will the payments of the future, high-speed payments on New Payments Platform (NPP) rails, have played?
While the growth numbers for NPP look impressive, there’s debate around whether cheaper, near real-time payments should be even further advanced. That’s certainly a point Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock was less than happy about in her speech and Q&A on the payments system last week.
Bullock made clear the central bank did not want to mandate NPP capability but “in the end, if it requires a mandate, legislation, then we will do it — not legislation so much as regulation — but we would prefer, really, just to work with the industry to get it done”.
