Executives at two of Australia’s “big four” banks have ruled out allowing retail customers to trade cryptocurrency on their platforms, with one reasoning that customers don’t understand “basic financial well-being.” Speaking at the Australian Financial Review Banking Summit on Tuesday Maile Carnegie, executive for retail banking at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), said that from speaking to retail customers, she believed “the vast majority of them don’t understand really basic financial well-being concepts.” “Are we really going to make it easier and less friction and implicitly endorse speculating on crypto when they don’t understand basic financial well-being? The answer was no.” Carnegie said ANZ had considered a cryptocurrency product from as early as 2017, adding she was...
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has put its plans for a second pilot program of crypto trading services on hold indefinitely and cut off access to those in the first round of testing. CBA sent Cointelegraph a transcript of a Tuesday bank briefing where CEO Matt Comyn said that he was still waiting on regulatory clarity. He also said that he was “working with a number of regulators very closely, as you would imagine, about the appropriate treatment of this particular product:” “Our intention still, at this stage, is to restart the pilot, but there are still a couple of things that we want to work through on a regulatory front to make sure that that is most appropriate.” Comyn said there is a Treasury submission for the program already under review, but he did not share any expected...