The Productivity Commission chairman, Peter Harris, was the final guest speaker at the ASIC annual forum yesterday. He outlined some of the key themes from the interim findings of the Productivity Commission's inquiry into competition in the financial system.Harris opened by reminding his audience that his brief was to discover if the market "exhibited the characteristics of competition or exhibited the characteristics of market power".He showed a slide indicating what he figured was one of the most objectives indication of the effects of true competition: the margin on mortgage rates over the cash rate.The graph showed the entry of Aussie Home Loans and mortgage brokers generally 25 years ago, where the margin dropped from four-plus per cent to approximately two per cent. "They managed to hold that margin down for a very long sustained period for more than a decade until the global financial crisis intervened," Harris observedHarris said this was an indication of the existence of market power, but it did not indicate who was exercising that market power. "It could have been the mortgage brokers themselves [rather than the big banks]," he said. "The question is: what are they doing today with that particular power?"Another marker of market power he saw was the net interest margin, which has remained stable for the larger banks for decades. "That is the most important thing for market power: If you can sustain a margin no matter what, then you have market power," he said.Referring tangentially to the banking royal commission in Melbourne Harris noted that the banks themselves have admitted being unable to push back against the brokers on competition. "People haven't focused on this aspect of the way we would in a competition inquiry," he said.Another unexpected conclusion: competition is heavily influenced by the actions of regulators - and that is not always in a positive way. Harris said he wanted more transparency on regulators' decisions: for example, The Council of Financial Regulators to publish minutes at the time macroprudential interventions by APRA occur."Our proposition is: let's make information useful. We know information is collected and available in real-time or near real-time [by banks and regulators]," Harris said."What was last month's actual loan rate for a western suburbs Sydney property of a particular value, for example?"We know that in the digital era this sort of information is collected and available inside the financial institutions. ASIC can publish in near to real time the median home loan rates for every ADI by loan type and location."Let's have the actual price, not the standard variable rate."Another theme favoured by Harris as a prime target for improved disclosure is lender's mortgage insurance. "Twenty-three per cent of owner-occupiers pay LMI and about 13 per cent of investors, making 19 per cent overall - this is $6,000 to $20,000 extra costs, usually added to the size of the loan," he said.