Originally Posted by
smashingly
IMHO the best commercial strategy for ANZ would be to wait until October or the New Year when they’ve won ex KB customers seeking a decent airpoints card, then ramp up their annual fees to mitigate the interchange fee changes. They will have a more monopolistic position once KB exits, and they don’t have the same “people’s bank” mission statement as KB. Which doesn’t bode well for us, but I don’t see how else ANZ’s card can be commercially sustainable with interchange fees being further reduced in future.
Annual fees can't even get close to matching the revenue from interchange though - that can easily be thousands of dollars per year (obviously the bank only gets a portion of this though).
The problem with the Commerce Commission is that your can easily argue that they're the ones acting on an anticompetitive manner.
It's pretty hard for any new finsec provider who wants to lodge new products in the market to do so when the revenue streams are disappearing. There actions are simply discouraging potential competition.