Wattle Wire — Friday 13 November 2026

Morning! ASIC takes CBA to court, Westpac fronts MPs, and United shuts out AI agents.

Covers Thursday morning 12 November to Friday morning 13 November 2026, Sydney time.

Regulators checked: RBA, ASIC, AUSTRAC, APRA, ACCC, Treasury, AusPayNet. Items from ASIC are under Regulation & Policy. No RBA payments data this window; the October release is due on 7 December.

ASIC said on 12 November it has started civil penalty proceedings against Commonwealth Bank, alleging its CommBiz terms did not disclose a second "contra leg" fee charged on direct debit and direct credit payments, overcharging about 42,000 business customers around $8.5 million between November 2020 and May 2025, with the misleading terms allegedly in place since CommBiz launched in 2006. ASIC also alleges governance failures despite customer complaints from at least 2015 and a 2016 internal audit, and is seeking declarations, penalties and adverse publicity orders; no penalty has been set and the court has made no findings, while CBA has apologised, says it self-reported the issue, stopped the fees in June 2025, has paid more than $26.4 million to about 93,000 customers, and expects to defend aspects of the claim.

Worth knowing: the alleged problem sits in the half of a bulk payment most customers never look at: the matching debit or credit to their own account. ASIC's example is a business paying 10 staff from two accounts being charged 12 fees when it was told about 10. CBA told the ABC the fee was 25 cents plus GST, which is small per payment but adds up fast across weekly payroll and collection files. The lesson for payments product owners is that the fee schedule has to describe every leg the billing engine charges, line for line, and complaints that hint at a mismatch need to reach someone who can fix it. With BECS on its way out and businesses moving direct debits and credits to NPP and PayTo, repricing those products is a good moment to check the terms match the bill. Timing is awkward for CBA: CEO Matt Comyn fronts the House of Representatives economics committee today, a day after the case was filed, so expect MPs to ask him about CommBiz.

Read: ASIC media release 26-279MR · ABC News · AAP (via The Examiner)

Westpac CEO Anthony Miller told the House of Representatives economics committee's annual hearing with the major bank CEOs on 12 November that Australia should prioritise productivity and supply over managing demand, linking lower government spending to inflation returning to target and rates coming down, and said home loan applications are starting to lift. On AI, he said some of the hype is overstated and the technology has a long way to go, and that Westpac is not planning an immediate shift to replacing people with agentic AI.

Worth knowing: payments barely came up in the reported exchanges, which is a contrast with last year. At the November 2025 hearing Miller went after Meta over scam ads and bank accounts openly sold on Facebook, called for a code platforms must follow, and said Westpac's Safer Pay checks had saved customers up to $690 million. With the Scams Prevention Framework now putting duties on platforms as well as banks, the absence of scam fireworks this time may say more about where the pressure has moved than about the problem going away. The AI comments matter for payments teams too: a bank that is cautious about agents inside its own operations is likely to be just as careful about letting outside agents move customers' money. ANZ's Nuno Matos, appearing the same day, flagged AI's use in fraud and scams as part of its dark side.

Read: AAP (via Harden Express) · The Nightly · The Nightly (Nov 2025 hearing) · Kalkine (ANZ)

Nothing notable this window. Wattlebird checked and went back to sleep.

Nine trade associations, including the National Retail Federation and the National Grocers Association, have sued the OCC and NCUA in federal court in Washington, arguing the regulators skipped notice-and-comment steps when they moved to preempt Illinois' Interchange Fee Prohibition Act, Payments Dive reported on 12 November. The 2024 law bans interchange on the sales tax and tip portions of card purchases; parts of it are already blocked in a separate bank-led case now before the 7th Circuit, and Illinois has delayed its start to 1 July 2027.

Worth knowing: from Australia, where the RBA sets interchange caps centrally, a state-by-state fight over which slice of a bill attracts interchange looks messy. The idea behind it travels, though: once merchants can't pass card costs on, they look harder at the base the fee is charged on. With surcharging on cards gone here since 1 October, expect local merchant groups to keep pressing on interchange and scheme fees rather than surcharges.

Read: Payments Dive

Nothing notable this window. Wattlebird checked and went back to sleep.

Nothing notable this window. Wattlebird checked and went back to sleep.

United Airlines said on 11 November (US time) that it is blocking unauthorised third-party AI agents from booking its flights, including agents working through travel agencies and aggregators, while still letting them search fares, citing risks to customer data, unintended purchases and MileagePlus miles, PYMNTS reported on 12 November. Delta still lets agents that can authenticate a passenger complete bookings, Airbnb plans its own AI travel agent for the first half of 2027, and OpenAI's purchase of trip-booking startup Odessia became public on 10 November.

Worth knowing: this is the merchant version of JPMorgan barring outside agents from logging in with customer credentials about a month ago. The real target is password sharing, not agents as such. The schemes' answer is registered agents carrying their own tokens and spending limits, through tools like Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay, so a merchant can tell a known agent from a scraper. Australian airlines and big billers will face the same choice soon, and issuers have a reason to make agent tokens easy before customers start handing over their logins.

Read: PYMNTS

The US Federal Trade Commission is taking public comment until the end of November on updating its impersonation rule so that large technology platforms share responsibility for stopping scam ads and posts, Payments Dive reported on 12 November. The FTC says consumers lost about US$16 billion to fraud last year, around a quarter more than in 2024, including about US$3.5 billion to imposter schemes; Google, Meta and Apple had not commented at publication.

Worth knowing: Australia is already further down this road: the Scams Prevention Framework spreads obligations across banks, telcos and digital platforms rather than leaving banks to absorb the losses alone. The US debate shows how contested that shift is. For Australian banks it is a useful reminder that the case for platform accountability rests on data about where scams start, so tracing losses back to ads and posts matters.

Read: Payments Dive

Nothing notable this window. Wattlebird checked and went back to sleep.

Drafted by Wattlebird, Wattle Wire's AI research desk, and checked by an editor. Not financial advice. Summaries paraphrase the linked sources.