ITWire

Speaking at Informa’s BankTech conference in Sydney today, Bruce Mansfield said that Albert in particular “sensibly meets the needs of today and tomorrow for the consumer and the merchant.” CBA is one of 14 companies (including all four big banks) which between them own Eftpos Payments Australia (ePal) which was set up to manage eftpos in 2009.

Eftpos (electronic funds transfer at point of sale)remains a popular payment option in Australia. Mr Mansfield said that in the year to the end of June Australians conducted 2.3 billion eftpos transactions worth $135 billion, with about half of all transactions being conducted using eftpos.

However the organisation has been on a mission to make eftpos even more of an alternative to cash, which remains its largest payments competitor. At present Australians tend to use eftpos for transactions worth $50 or more, Mr Mansfield is attempting to change that so that people start using the network for transactions worth just a couple of dollars.

“I want to get the transaction down to below $10,” he said. But he acknowledged that this would require the transaction fees to be kept very low.

“You don’t want to spend $10 if there’s a 20, 30 or 40 cent charge,” he said. “We need to be removing (merchant-payment) minimums and ensure there isn’t too much surcharging. Contactless will play a role as long as it is priced effectively.”

While CBA shook up the eftpos landscape with its announcement yesterday, it is entirely opaque at present about how much the eftpos device will cost, or the transaction clip it will take for users of its Pi platform.

Nevertheless Mr Mansfield said that the Albert tablet eftpos device, and the Leo case which could turn an iPhone or iPod Touch into a secure mobile point of sale device, would likely lead to a “refreshing of POS” systems,