Living in hope, living on fumes and living off the fat of the latest capital raise, there appears to be no shortage of fintechs wondering if they might be ‘the one’.

The next bank licenced in Australia that is.

APRA advised that it has recently recommenced licensing of banking, insurance, and superannuation businesses, Tim Wilson’s Economics Committee reminds the industry in its second report on APRA for the year.

These are in two phases:

- the first phase will ‘concentrate on branches or subsidiaries, where the parent might be well capitalised with strong established systems’; and - the second phase, which will be implemented in early 2021, will be ‘for new or very small players’ (read: fintechs or mortgage managers getting big-headed).

As at September 2020, APRA reported that A$179 billion of loans had been granted temporary repayment deferrals, which is approximately 6.7 per cent of total loans.

It noted that housing loans make up the majority of total loans granted repayment deferrals, but that SME loans have a higher incidence of repayment deferral, with 10.8 per cent of SME loans subject to repayment deferral, compared with 7.4 per cent of housing loans.

As at October 2020, loan repayment deferrals had ‘come down significantly’. APRA explained that originally the deferrals were around 10 per cent of the banks’ books and are now around 6.6 per cent.

APRA told the committee that ‘whilst there has been some fraudulent activity in relation to the early-release scheme…it has been at a relatively low level based on the information that has been reported’.

It explained that fraudulent activity has been ‘in the order of hundreds out of the four million or so payments that have been made’. Furthermore, APRA noted that there have been ‘a number of cases that have been detected and stopped…therefore the amount of money that has gone out in fraudulent payments is also very low’.