An apparent lift in market share among taxi drivers in Victoria allowed Cabcharge to offset most of the impact of a curb in its service fee. Cabcharge, in its full year results, said it experienced growth of six per cent in turnover on its Cabcharge payment system. The mix of payment cards presented continues to shift away from Cabcharge's proprietary cards toward bank issued cards. Its profit fell seven per cent to A$56 million. St George Bank has announced that, from September, it will allow customers with an iPhone 5 to log onto mobile banking using just a fingerprint. TouchID will later be rolled out to the Galaxy 5 smartphone. St George won't store customers' fingerprint data itself, but piggyback on Apple's existing fingerprint service that can be used to verify the identity of users. Other banks have also been experimenting with biometrics, particularly with voice verification. ANZ Australia CEO Phil Chronican yesterday said that it was now likely that the bank would offer the service to its customers, though didn't specify how or when. Sixty-two per cent of people "do not trust financial advice from the Big Four," a survey commissioned by the Customer Owned Banking Association found. An Essential Research poll of 1000 people also found 86 per cent of Australians "think there needs a little or a lot more transparency and clarity regarding rates and fees" while 54 per cent "believe there needs to be more competition in the banking market." The "Big Four banks dominate the market partly because they play under rules that are unfair to other competitors," COBA CEO Mark Degotardi said in a media release. The Commonweath Bank will today open a new county bank in rural China as its attempts to build an extensive network to capitalise upon the nation's next phase of regional economic growth, TheAustralian has reported. The Handanxian County Bank in the Hebei province, which surrounds the Beijing municipality, will specialise in small-to-medium businesses and agricultural lending and is the 15th bank of its ­nature that CBA has opened in the past three years. Five out of 14 publicised interventions by ASIC in connection with market supervision involved banks, the regulator's annual report on the topic shows. Citi Paribas, CBA, Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse were the five. ASIC said that "in the relevant period, we conducted a total of 122 market surveillance enquiries of equities and futures participants, including reactive, proactive and targeted surveillances." US regulators have taken another step in their quest to impose ever larger penalties, a trend foreshadowed by FSI chairman David Murray in speech at a CIFR forum yesterday. Overnight, Bank of America announced a comprehensive US$17 billion settlement with the US Department of Justice and other agencies, stemming primarily from conduct at Countrywide and Merrill Lynch prior to BoA's acquisition of those entities. The US major has been forced to extend borrower relief and releases on a wide range of mortgages, along with demolition of uninhabitable and abandoned property. The bank will