NSW senator Andrew Bragg leads push to make Australia a financial technology world-leader
Australia lags the world in creating technology powerhouses. A parliamentary investigation led by a new Sydney-based senator aims to set the conditions that will allow us to be a pacesetter.
NSW
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A new federal parliamentary inquiry is aiming to set the conditions to create more companies like Atlassian and Afterpay.
The Senate committee investigation focuses on how Australia can become a world leader in financial and regulatory technology, but chairman NSW Liberal Andrew Bragg said under this “umbrella” it would also look at agriculture and medical innovation.
“Technology is here,” Senator Bragg said. “If we are not good at it, the jobs will go elsewhere.”
The inquiry will look at five areas — tax, regulation, culture, skills and access to capital and skills.
On tax, better access to research and development incentives may be needed.
Mr Bragg, who joined the Senate in June, noted in an issues paper released by the committee today that business spending on R&D was lower than the OECD average.
And improving the culture in FinTech was “imperative” to making Australia a world leader in the field.
“We want our neighbours to look to Australia for technological innovation,” he said. “This requires existing national champions in the tech space, such as Atlassian, as well as emerging players to help drive industry culture forward in Australia and ensure that we are not simply copying what has worked elsewhere.
“Local FinTech ‘unicorns’ like AirWallex, Afterpay, and Zip Money have proven they can compete on an international scale — and more FinTechs and RegTechs must be supported to do the same.”
Business software company Atlassian was founded in Sydney in 2002. It is now worth $38 billion. Melbourne-based Afterpay is worth $7.5 billion.
Still, Australia has a lot of work to do to become an international force in tech.
The latest rankings of economic complexity, developed by Harvard University’s Center for International Development, had Australia at 86th globally — the lowest ranked of all developed economies and lower than many developing countries.
Improving regulation of technology had potential benefits for consumers, Mr Bragg said.
For example, the inquiry will look at the case for “write-access” to customer data in areas such as banking, which would allow “accredited data recipients to make changes to a customer’s financial data held by other institutions and to use this access for activities such as account switching or even payment initiation”.
Mr Bragg said comparison business Finder had argued write-access “could act as an antidote to the inertia seen today in the retail banking market”.
There were also opportunities to use technology and consumer’s data to make superannuation more transparent in areas such as fees.
“The super industry is very anti-competitive,” Mr Bragg said. “This would be an innovative way of solving that.”
Originally published as NSW senator Andrew Bragg leads push to make Australia a financial technology world-leader