With the big four Aussie banks dominating our financial landscape, it feels like the move to open banking and more innovative fintech services is happening at a glacial pace.

Countries with more competition and a diversity of players in the banking sector, such as the United Kingdom and Singapore, have moved faster to open up options in digital payments, new financial services, and ‘neobanks’, which exist entirely online.

But there is a lot of innovation happening in this space, and on episode 22 of The Business of Tech podcast, we talk to Worldline’s Julia Nicol, who outlines the upcoming debut of contactless Eftpos, as well as Tristan Dakin of Wise, who explains the digital money transfer platform’s new deal with Swift, and what it could mean for integration with banks worldwide.

Although the introduction of consumer data rights legislation will help to open up the market here in the coming years, barriers remain, such as real-time, 24-7, bank-to-bank settlement of transactions, which Australia has enabled through its Next-generation Payment Platform.

Also on the podcast, BusinessDesk’s media writer Daniel Dunkley joins us to talk about Meta’s standoff with the Canadian government over the Online News Act, which requires the social media giant to pay news publishers for the right to carry snippets of their content on its platforms.

Meta has rejected that, instead removing links to news content from its platform. With comparable legislation in the pipeline here, are we about to see a similar showdown with Meta and Google, or would a change of government following the election see it shelved completely?

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