Banks and other financial institutions will now have to display statistics on their websites of the reliability of the services they provide to households and businesses.

These new disclosures, which started on Monday, will provide standardised quarterly statistics on significant outages and availability for individual services offered by retail payments providers.

They are being published on the websites of a range of individual service providers, including large and smaller banks and more specialised payments providers.

The services include ATMs, branches, cardholder payments, card acceptance for businesses, access to accounts using online banking, “fast” account transfers and “next business day” account transfers.

‘It is vital for the smooth functioning of day-to-day economic activity that retail payments providers maintain reliable services for their customers,” Reserve Bank of Australia assistant governor for the financial system Michele Bullock said in a statement.

“The new reliability disclosures are intended to support this objective.”

This initiative has been endorsed by the Payments System Board, which comes under the stewardship of the RBA, and disclosures will be updated each quarter.

– AAP