New Statistical Disclosures on Retail Payment Service Reliability

The Reserve Bank today announced the introduction of new quarterly statistical disclosures on the reliability of payment services provided to households and businesses. These statistics are being published on the websites of a range of individual service providers, including large and smaller banks and more specialised payments providers. This initiative has been endorsed by the Payments System Board to support transparency about retail payment service reliability.

The new disclosures provide standardised quarterly statistics on significant outages and availability for individual services offered by retail payments providers. The specified individual services are: ATMs, branches, cardholder payments, card acceptance for businesses, access to accounts using online banking, ‘fast’ account transfers and ‘next business day’ account transfers.

The first disclosures have been made today. These data indicate that the availability of individual retail payment services was generally high in the September quarter, although outage time for some providers’ online banking and fast account transfer services was elevated.

RBA Assistant Governor (Financial System) Michele Bullock said, ‘It is vital for the smooth functioning of day-to-day economic activity that retail payments providers maintain reliable services for their customers. The new reliability disclosures are intended to support this objective. The Reserve Bank thanks institutions for their active efforts in developing and disclosing these standardised statistics.’

Going forward, the disclosures will be published by individual providers on the 15th calendar day of the second month after the end of each calendar quarter (e.g. 15 February for the December quarter data).

The full list of providers and links to their website disclosures, as well as information about the compilation of the disclosure statistics, are available on the Reserve Bank’s website.