All this means financial market activity that is important to Australia will be increasingly reliant on centralised financial market infrastructure. The logic of this reform is that it will reduce and simplify bilateral exposures between counterparties. But it will also increase the systemic importance of the financial infrastructure, because we will in effect be creating a small number of “single points of failure”.
The Banking Supervision Department intends to tighten the enforcement of its directives in this regard and to increase customers’ awareness of it. The power to supervise bank fees will also enable steps to be taken as necessary to reduce the costs of switching between banks. 2. Increasing the transparency of banking activity for customers.