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$450,000 is invested into MoneySwitch by the existing shareholders.

Start-up credit company MoneySwitch has confirmed it is undergoing a regulatory assessment for an SCCI licence.

MoneySwitch lodges its final Specialist Credit Card Institution License (SCCI) application with APRA.

Jost Stollmann meets the founders and starts in an
advisory role.

MoneySwitch restated its preference that the Reserve Bank tackle more than just interchange, and develop a complementary, industry wide access regime. The access regime must impose determinable conditions relating to setup costs, timescales and sharing of ongoing communications, maintenance and support costs.

Beautiful - emerging niche players in their infancy (e.g. Virgin Money, Liberty Financial, MoneySwitch).

While the first SCCI application might be authorised in just months, the process appears to be lengthy. MoneySwitch chief executive Paul Wood said the company was still gathering information for Apra, after lodging an application in late May.

The shake-up delivered reductions for retailers of $430 million in the fees banks charge to process credit. According to the RBA, fees to retailers average 1.05 per cent for every MasterCard or Visa credit purchase.

Start-up MoneySwitch plans to take on the banks in the credit card and Eftpos processing markets, but chief executive Paul Wood concedes that it faces an uphill battle to become an independent payments player. MoneySwitch’s five directors saw an opportunity in replacing telephone dial-up card processing in Australia with an internet-based model, while also providing an alternative to the banks, Mr Wood said.

An aspiring entrant to the Eftpos network highlighted the concerns of the Reserve Bank of Australia yesterday by outlining the many barriers to entering the market. In a submission to the RBA on the potential reregulation of the Eftpos and ATM markets, MoneySwitch says it encountered several impediments to entering the Eftpos market as a processer of transactions.

All the argy bargy about “reform” of payments systems and “access”” may not matter a jot if there’s no real likelihood of entry by new providers. And in the merchant acquiring space, there’s only in fact only one entity that’s consistently flagged an interest in entering the market, the Sydney-based start-up MoneySwitch, a company run by a trio of former Cisco executives.

The Reserve Bank's reforms to credit card schemes came into effect over 2003 and early 2004. One of the key elements of the reforms was the lowering of the fee paid by a merchant's bank to a cardholder's bank whenever a credit card purchase is made - the so-called interchange fee.

MoneySwitch officially begins the Specialist Credit Card
License (SCCI) application process with the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA).

$600,000 is invested into MoneySwitch.

William Bartlett and Denis Calvert join as Non-Executive Directors.