The pandemic helped the banks push contactless which they love, because it’s not EFTPOS.
EFTPOS is our national post of sale system, it has very low or no fees for any party involved. Merchants pay a fixed machine rental per month which can include unlimited transactions, or may have a per transaction fee of up to $0.20. Most individuals do not pay a fee for using EFTPOS and there’s normally no card fee, though some banks have accounts with fees that have other benefits (eg higher deposit interest rates to encourage saving).
Contactless goes via the standard card network extortion. Since 2022 the interchange rate has been capped by legislation which has helped merchants a lot, but the per transaction fee over the card network is still far higher than EFTPOS.
Contactless EFTPOS does exist in Australia - we share a lot of the underlying tech - but the banks won’t activate it here because they’d lose the interchange fees.
Online EFTPOS is starting to gain market share though, which is nice.
EFTPOS is our national post of sale system, it has very low or no fees for any party involved. Merchants pay a fixed machine rental per month which can include unlimited transactions, or may have a per transaction fee of up to $0.20. Most individuals do not pay a fee for using EFTPOS and there’s normally no card fee, though some banks have accounts with fees that have other benefits (eg higher deposit interest rates to encourage saving).
Contactless goes via the standard card network extortion. Since 2022 the interchange rate has been capped by legislation which has helped merchants a lot, but the per transaction fee over the card network is still far higher than EFTPOS.
Contactless EFTPOS does exist in Australia - we share a lot of the underlying tech - but the banks won’t activate it here because they’d lose the interchange fees.
Online EFTPOS is starting to gain market share though, which is nice.