The speech to the elite economic forum in Wiesbaden yesterday explained that Mr Morrison had a “personal interest” in the topic of digitalisation of finance, which he said was one of the “priorities of Germany’s 2017 G20 Presidency”.
“Of course, financial technology — or FinTech — is transforming the world’s financial systems and economies,” Mr Morrison said.
“Consumers’ preferences are already changing the way that many financial products and services are delivered, simultaneously utilising and requiring technological innovations to keep up with the demands of a rapidly changing world. From Australia’s perspective, we see huge benefits — huge opportunities — emerging in this space.”
Among a number of emerging financial technologies, the treasurer said automation of services is an especially welcome trend, resulting in “lower costs and an increase in people using a particular service”.
“One of the prime examples is robo-advice, which has the potential to offer financial advice to a wider cross section of the community,” Mr Morrison said.
“In Australia, businesses are beginning to integrate robo-advice into the retirement savings system to help people engage and prepare more fully for retirement. But that is not where the opportunities end.”
Mr Morrison said the federal government will be enacting policy and regulatory responses to help foster fintech innovation, pointing to ASIC’s regulatory sandbox.
The politicians make me sick. They bang on about jobs, jobs and more jobs yet what they are doing is destroying jobs. They bury advisers in over the top compliance and red tape under the consumer protection banner yet let the product flogging institutions get away with murder calling it fintech or robo advice. What a joke. No level playing field here. Only one agenda out there.
Roboadvice is just inhouse electronic product flogging. It is “advice” in the same way that a CBA bank teller suggesting you transfer all your super to a CBA product is “advice”. I thought we were trying to get away from conflicted product flogging that harms consumers?
Oh come on don’t pick on the CBA they” ve been only able to get back 4 million dollars from the 13 the lent billabong boss.The CBA has never defrauded any of their customers now have they, yet no one has gone to jail for the CBA wonderful defrauding of their customers.Power to the IFA
The politicians continue to get hoodwinked that this new world technology needs to be supported by relaxing consumer protection. We are starting to see negative implications of the relaxing of regulations with Uber and AirBnB. It really makes no sense to create an unlevel playing field in the regulation of any industry. Uber are losing billions daily with an objective to destroy the cab industry so that one day they can dominate that space ( and then increase their prices and use driverless cars ). That is not good for the economy. It destroys jobs and transfers profits ( eventually ) overseas into the hands of the few. Providing advice over the internet is also a nonsense. The conversion to sales (less than 2% ) is evidence of that. Not to mention the absence of consumer protection. When will the politicians and regulators wake up ?