The ACCC’s will target anti-competitive conduct in the digital payments markets and protect the interests of consumers this year, according to Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb.

Cass-Gottlieb used her keynote speech at yesterday’s AFR Banking Summit 2022 to make the watchdog’s priorities clear.

“Payment systems, services and competitors are rapidly evolving,” she said.

“COVID-19 has accelerated the transition to digital payments and precipitated a major shift in the way people live, do business, and engage with the economy as a whole.

“Industry data and our own observations show that the long run shift to card payments is now being transformed to cards digitally stored in mobile wallets on smartphones or other wearable mobile devices which are used to make contactless payments at point of sale and increasingly in online payments.”

The ACCC will be targeting the wave of new services in the payments ecosystem, such as payment gateways, payment aggregators, mobile wallet providers and cryptocurrencies.

“In response, payments regulation is undergoing a comprehensive redesign for the first time in 25 years,” she explained.

Earlier this week, the ACCC took Mastercard to the Federal Court, alleging that, after the least cost routing initiative was introduced, Mastercard entered into agreements with more than 20 major retail businesses, offering discounted rates for Mastercard credit card transactions.

This discount were given, provided the retailers “committed to processing all or most of their Mastercard-eftpos debit card transactions through Mastercard rather than the [often cheaper] eftpos network.”

In addition, the ACCC have “identified competition and consumer concerns” in search, social media, app marketplaces, in app payments, display advertising, search advertising, and the ad tech supply chain.

They are targeting Apple’s self-preferencing and restriction of competitor access with its tap-and-go payments using the NFC chip on Apple mobile devices to its own Apple Pay app and Apple wallet.