ABA CEO interview with FiveAA Adelaide’s Will Goodings and Stacey Lee on regional banking

E&OE
Radio Interview
Interview on FiveAA Adelaide
8 October 2026

Topics: Regional banking

Will Goodings: The Australian Banking Association have put in some work into a novel concept that would see the law changed to allow their members: which is 20 different banks across Australia, including the big four – to allow them to coordinate on joint infrastructure. These things would be known as banking hubs, where, as I imagine it, we’ll ask Simon Birmingham, the CEO, in a moment, you could go into what would be a branch, except it wouldn’t be a branch for one bank, Westpac, CommBank, whoever else, NAB, ANZ. It would be one for all of them. A banking hub that would obviously exist in the regions. Now this occurs in other countries, the UK and New Zealand. We have antitrust rules in Australia that prevent this from happening here, and the Banking Association are making the point – well, in an environment where the business model has changed and branches face closure, this would be a way of making face-to-face access be able to exist out in the regions into the future. Simon Birmingham, the CEO of the Banking Association, joins us. Simon, good morning.

Simon Birmingham: Good morning, Will, Stacey, and listeners.

Will Goodings: I understand your argument, but I mean, this is why we have antitrust legislation, isn’t it? Because this is a textbook case of cartel trading. You guys are all going to benefit and the customer loses out through lack of competition. Do they not?

Simon Birmingham: Well, no Will, it is why we are taking very careful steps, and yes, it starts with the fact that we have made an application to the ACCC to be able to have discussions to do certain things. Really, there are three things we’re asking them to let banks do. One is to talk about the development of some commitments to regional Australia, so that we can provide some degree of certainty that face-to-face banking services will remain available in regional Australia. You’ve got banks with different moratorium timelines in terms of branch closures that step out over the next few years, but we want to make sure that those commitments are clear. The second is we want to have discussions about trialling in up to 10 locations this banking hub model. We’ll come back to what that is in a sec. And the third is we want to be able to talk about, well, how do we actually fund that sort of shared infrastructure and have those discussions? The banking hub model that we are talking about trialling is very clearly for up to 10 locations that don’t currently have a bank branch in those towns, so it won’t replace any bank branch. It won’t change the competition dynamics there. And yes, it’s why we’re having to make sure that we are very clearly working within the boundaries of Australia’s competition laws by trying to deal with a problem in the fact that interactions in regional bank branches are down some 63 per cent over recent years. People just don’t go in and use them like they used to. That clearly undermines their viability. But we know that people still value knowing they can get face-to-face support for banking services at times. So how do we make sure the competition for what the bank product is – so this doesn’t change what your account is, what the interest rates are, any of those sorts of things. All competition in terms of lending services, deposit services, all of that, go your hardest. But can you actually just get face-to-face services to help you with your identity checks, with actually getting a problem solved, so that’s really what we’re trying to focus on here.

Stacey Lee: A lot of the, from what I can read, a lot of the services that would be available at these hubs: deposits, withdrawals, paying of bills, ID checks – a lot of that can be done at a post office at the moment. Why is there a need for there to be another location instead of a post office?

Simon Birmingham: Some of it can, Stacey. We would hope this goes a little further than what the current Bank@Post offering is, but we do see Bank@Post as being really important. In fact, the intention in terms of trialling up to 10 of these services is that some of them would be a specific hub that essentially is like a bank branch, except it is coordinated in terms of having a shared employee who provides that face-to-face service. Some of them we want to trial will be using delivery partners, and we think Australia Post could well be one of those delivery partners. So how do we take the existing Bank@Post model that gives particularly cash access to additional sites around Australia for people who don’t want to use an ATM and want to get their cash over the counter? How can we perhaps take that a little further in terms of the provision of extra support in terms of those face-to-face banking services?

Will Goodings: All right, it’s an interesting concept, and we’ll get our listeners’ thoughts on it very shortly. Simon Birmingham, the CEO of the Australian Banking Association. Thank you for your time.

Ends

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