Reports in The Sydney Morning Herald indicate that Australia’s banks are less than wholly enthused to jump on board the Apple Pay bandwagon – despite the fact that issuers in the U.S., United Kingdom and Canada have elected to do precisely that.

Mr Narev said CBA had already offered the same functionality as Apple Pay through its app – for users of Android phones – for two years, so it was hard for Apple to argue it is providing much value. A new report out of Australia may highlight the reason for the global holdup: fees.

Australia’s banks are understood to be reluctant to let Apple infiltrate a market which earns them around AU$2 billion ($1.4 billion) annually in interchange fees.

‘If not Apple, it might be Google’Apple takes 15 cents for every $100 processed using its system. Investors in Australia were informed of the two-part bond sales just recently and told that Apple will offer four-year and seven-year bonds in the country.

Unlike the U.S., Australia is also further along rolling out NFC payment terminals to the point where it is a standard technology.

To work, however, the platform needs a deal with the bank that issued the credit card – and that’s where Australia’s big four banks are holding up progress, according to Fairfax Media. “There is functionality associated with Apple Pay that we have had in the market for 18 months to two years”.

Information gathered reveals that the issues involved in the negotiation mainly deal with the fees that Apple Pay intends to collect from their partners.

Firstly, the Reserve Bank of Australia is forcing banks to contribute to the cost of building a real-time payments infrastructure and the banks reportedly don’t want Apple to take advantage of this investment without contributing to the project.

Apple is also negotiating from a position of weakness given that the take-up of Apple Pay in the US appears to be sagging.

Despite CBA’s opposition, Narev believes that sooner or later large multinational companies will have an effect on the country’s financial services industry: “If not Apple, it might be Goole: if it’s not Google it might be Samsung: if it’s not Samsung it might be Amazon [or its] going to be someone else”.

“But we have got customers, we have got distribution, we have got brand, we have got product”.