CBA fails to win ANZ support in Apple Pay stoush

ANZ Bank chief executive Shayne Elliott has said his bank is used to being the “little guy” and had worked successfully with Apple Pay.

ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliott. Picture: AAP

Commonwealth Bank has failed to win the support of ANZ Bank in its battle against Apple Pay over the tech giant’s dominance of the local “tap and go” segment of the payments system.

CBA chief executive Matt Comyn has been a vocal critic of Apple Pay’s creeping dominance, telling the House economics committee on Thursday that the US company controls 80 per cent of tap and go transactions through its iPhone handsets.

While the competition regulator is investigating restricted access to the NFC chip on iPhones which communicates with merchant payment terminals, ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliott said it was “kind of ironic” that one of Australia’s biggest companies, CBA, was complaining about having to deal with large competitors.

“It’s interesting – the big yellow bank in Sydney is almost twice our size in home loans,” Mr Elliott told the committee.

“It’s not something we’ve really spent any time on; we’re kind of used to being the little guy and having to deal and work and partner with others.”

The ANZ chief said position had nothing to do with the Melbourne-based bank breaking ranks with its rivals in 2016 to become the first of the Big Four to sign up with Apple Pay.

“But I think that’s a good example,” he said.

“We have to win, so we took a very simple view about our customers being able to use their phones in a really simple, convenient and elegant way.

“We thought our customers were going to love it and history has proven us right.”

CBA chief executive Matt Comyn. Picture: Adam Yip

Mr Comyn presented a very different argument, saying that Apple was emerging as a “gatekeeper” of critical infrastructure, in a similar way to railroads, telecommunications companies and the internet in the past.

In Apple’s case, however, the instrument was the mobile phone.

“If you look at industries over time where they’ve been gatekeepers of infrastructure, they have been the subject of scrutiny and ultimately significant reform because of the way those powers are exerted as the gatekeeper,” he said.

It was “preposterous”, he said, that Apple had argued CBA was seeking sole control or access to the NFC chip.

The truth was that the bank had only ever sought equal access to other institutions or banks.

While accepting that Apple would use a different definition of the market to boost its pro-competition credentials, Mr Comyn said Apple was in favour of competition “as long as no one can compete with Apple”.

Mr Elliott agreed that Apple had a huge market share if the relevant market was defined as tap and go payments.

“If you want to narrowly define payments, that might be true,” he said. “But there will be other people who come along and look for new products and services to compete with that.”