Banking Day

Etienne Alexiou, ANZ’s former head of global balance sheet management who was dismissed in 2015, has largely lost his battle for compensation after the Federal Court of Australia rejected his employment and whistleblower claims, the AFR reports. Justice Nye Perran delivered a short oral judgement at the Federal Court of Australia on Friday. Unusually, Justice Perran has not yet published the reasons for his judgment.

Westpac New Zealand has become the first New Zealand bank accredited to issue digital credentials under the government’s Digital Identity Services Trust Framework (DISTF). This allows Westpac New Zealand to issue credentials that can be stored in the Govt.nz app wallet and shared with third parties. The bank is only the third organisation to reach the accreditation stage under the DISTF, joining the Government Digital Delivery Agency and NEC New Zealand.

A lengthy analysis - the Future of Banking Study: Future banking scenarios for NZ in 2035 -  by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand highlights the likelihood that the handsome margins and world-beating profits of the subsidiaries of the major Australian banks in New Zealand will progressively be competed away. This study “explores three plausible scenarios for how banking in New Zealand could evolve by 2035. “It does not predict the future or identify a preferred outcome.

One of CommBank’s most revered executives, Albert Naffah, has pushed back on the perception of the big bank being a ‘legacy’ provider in payments. “Experience is incredibly important when you are a scale player,” Naffah said on a panel at FinTech Australia’s Intersekt 2026 conference in Melbourne earlier this month. Naffah is CommBank’s General Manager Payment Acceptance.

“Does a pitch even work?” This was the opening question by Simon Burt, Head of Banking Transformation at NGM Group, Simon Burt, to Dan Chesterman, CIO at Teachers Mutual Bank, as part of panel discussion on fintech-bank partnerships at Intersekt 2026 in Melbourne in the first week of September. “There is definitely a place for partners and a pitch can be useful if you are really crisp and clear about what problem you are trying to solve,” Chesterman confirmed.

Total first-time insolvencies rose to 1834 in August, a marked step up on recent months and among the highest monthly readings in a long while, with construction accounting for a large share of the increase, the September 2026 edition of CreditorWatch’s Business Risk Index shows.

CEO of Australian Payments Plus (AP+), Lynn Kraus, has said ‘‘real-time will be in everything we do” in 2030 with the specific opportunity being to extend adoption into business and government payments, not just consumer.

Australia’s payments regulatory landscape is set for significant change. Some 700 AFSL holders will need to apply for a licence variation, and a few hundred – or more – additional businesses will need to enter ASIC’s regulated environment from 2027 when payments licensing reforms are expected to be enacted. Payments licensing in Australia is currently framed to catch the entity providing the non-cash payments (NCP) facility.

Sydney-based tokenised assets fintech Redbelly Network has announced the appointment of Christian Westerlind Wigstrom as its new CEO to start on Monday, 2 November 2026. Banking Day readers will be familiar with Westerlind Wigstrom from his almost 10-year tenure at payment services provider Monoova, where he was co-founder, and CEO until July this year. Westerlind Wigstrom also sits on the board of FinTech Australia and serves as an alternate director at AusPayNet.

Since the start of the year, digital sales at Westpac have risen from 50% to 80%. Good news, except … digital sales at Westpac were only 50% at the end of 2025?! Andrew McMullan Chief Data, Digital and AI Officer at Westpac and Dan Jermyn, the bank’s  Chief AI Officer, hosted a presentation yesterday. Westpac now has 6 million ‘digitally active’ customers, and “these customers are four times more active with us” McMullan said.