CommBank announces it will support Apple Pay come January, making it the second to do so of the four big banks in Australia; NAB and Westpac remain holdouts
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac :
Context & Ripple Effects
CommBank's January switch-on is the latest crack in a coordinated front that already failed once: in 2017 the ACCC rejected the four big banks' application to collectively negotiate with Apple over NFC access and boycott Apple Pay, leaving each bank to strike its own deal or hold out alone.
The holdout strategy has been eroding since then — when Android Pay launched in Australia, ANZ was already the only big-four bank willing to break ranks on a wallet platform, and that first-mover pattern is what CommBank is now repeating on Apple Pay.
First-order effects
- NAB and Westpac are now the only two of the big four without Apple Pay, isolating them as the last holdouts while CommBank and ANZ offer it to customers.
Second-order effects
- With the ACCC having blocked collective bargaining, NAB and Westpac face mounting customer pressure to negotiate individually with Apple rather than wait out the platform.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, wallet support stops being a negotiating lever for Australian banks and becomes table stakes — mirroring Apple's playbook elsewhere of signing entire national banking systems bank-by-bank, as it did with China's big four state-run banks and Canada's six largest.
The trend: Mobile wallet adoption is being decided bank-by-bank rather than through collective bank bargaining, with regulators' refusal to sanction boycotts accelerating defection to Apple Pay.