👉Background: Although the big 4 banks seem very similar to each other - just with different colours - they do actually have their areas of specialisation. For NAB, business banking is the golden ticket.

👉 What happened: Now, NAB is looking to go head on with fintech providers like Square. It is launching a phone-based contactless payment product. It's all about helping small businesses and micro merchants receive payments from customers.

👉 What else: It's aimed at hairdressers, coffee carts and people operating any “side hustles”. And it's all part of the plan to keep up with our cashless society.

What's the key learning?

💡Our society becomes more and more cashless with each and every day, so NAB is preparing its new product, Easy Tap, for a fully cashless society.

💡According to the Reserve Bank, around 75 per cent of card payments in Australia were made with a debit card between 2021 and 2022. On top of that, the average Australian made 625 electronic transactions last year, compared to just 275 transactions ten years before.

💡While NAB may be the first Big-4 mover into this space, it certainly won’t be the last.

• Westpac has announced a similar product that would allow customers to take payments directly from phones.
• Commonwealth Bank has already released a white, square-shaped card reader of its own.

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