Market snapshot and Australian business news

Market snapshot

By David Taylor

ASX 200: 0.2% to 8,995 points

Australian dollar: -0.1% at 71.64 US cents

Wall Street: Dow Jones (+0.6%), S & P 500 (+0.5%), Nasdaq Composite (+0.2%)

Europe: FTSE (-0.3%), DAX (-0.5%), Stoxx 600 (-0.2%)

Spot gold: 0.4% to $US4,406/ounce

Oil (Brent crude): FLAT at $US95.63/barrel

Iron ore: -1.6% to $US97.80/tonne

Bitcoin: FLAT at $US77,312

Prices current at around 12:00pm AEST

No quick fix for Australia's housing markets

By Gareth Hutchens

Sally Auld, chief economist of NAB, has also appeared at the senate committee on Intergenerational Housing Inequity today.

In her opening statement, Dr Auld said the current property price declines in Australia, even though they're forecast to be quite large, still won't be enough to improve housing affordability for millions of Australians.

She says the problems that have accumulated in Australia's housing system will take "a generation" to solve.

She said we had to figure out how to improve the country's ability to supply homes at a material rate.

Liberal senator Andrew Bragg asks Dr Auld about the mismatch between housing approvals and housing completions.

That led into a discussion about how lots of housing projects are approved but never go ahead, or are delayed by years, because they don't stack up economically.

Dr Auld said that's a genuine issue in Australia, and she listed a number of issues that were contributing to the overall problem: problems with planning approvals, problems with the provision of essential infrastructure to complement new housing projects, a shortage of skilled labour, and a large fall in productivity in the construction industry in recent decades.

She said none of these issues would be solved overnight.

Non-profit retailers worried about competing against $2 billion thrift store

By Adelaide Miller

A new Savers store opened in Geelong at the end of August, drawing people from across the region to attend the opening.

They were on the hunt for second-hand discounted clothes, and the company's 19th store in Australia was to provide just that.

But what is not commonly known is that Savers Australia is the subsidiary of a much larger US company, worth $2.2 billion, which has shares that trade on the New York Stock Exchange and is majority-owned by American private equity firm Ares Management.

Business reporter Emilia Terzon provides the details:

Moving on multiple fronts at the same time

By Daniel Ziffer

With technology moving quickly, Xero CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy talks about managing her 'bets' as a portfolio.

"Our AI strategy has very core bets"

"It's probably illustrative. We've got very core AI (capabilities) in book-keeping. But we also announced a Claude connector... last week we announced a bet on Casper, a kind of 'intern' in digital form"

"I don't think having portfolio bets is a lack of focus"

Xero CEO said the company "had everything I was looking for"

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is the CEO of Xero, she's spent half her career building her own companies and the other half with big companies Amazon and Google.

She left Amazon when it had about 1,000 staff and was at Google starting up its maps product. She "loves to build".

Xero's stock price has halved in the past year.

"I don't watch it daily, one would drive oneself crazy if you watched it daily," she says.

She referenced the SaaSpocalypse.

The SaaSpocalypse is a loss of confidence in software-as-a-service businesses like Xero that investors think might be smashed by AI.

Unsurprisingly she says "people can talk about our share price all they want" but the company will keep focusing on what it does well.

Ms Singh Cassidy says the company's customers are largely small businesses and they're using AI features in the Xero software, so the firm will benefit rather than lose as technology develops.

"We are not just a system of record but a system of trust."

Over 70 per cent of eligible shareholders voted against the Xero board’s decision to award Sukhinder Singh Cassidy a target pay package of US$25.5 million amid the company’s stock struggles.

Xero CEO not concerned about investors saying NO to her paypacket

By Daniel Ziffer

A huge whack recently.

Over 70 per cent of eligible shareholders voted against the Xero board’s decision to award Sukhinder Singh Cassidy a target pay package of US$25.5 million amid the company’s stock struggles.

(The stock prices has halved in a year).

Asked about that strike on the remuneration (rem) report, she says this:

"Matters of rem are matters for our board and our investors. For me it's about driving the success of the company."

"I own a million options, I own a half a million more shares... it's an amazing company. We are builders, builders of technology. That's where we're are going to stay focused".

APRA asks ING Australia to hold additional capital

By David Taylor

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has imposed licence conditions on ING Bank Australia Limited (ING Australia) and will require it to hold additional capital and liquidity in response to material breaches of the bank’s minimum liquidity requirements.

"ING Australia is one of Australia’s largest banks with more than 2 million customers nationwide and assets of over $100 billion," APRA Deputy Chair Therese McCarthy Hockey said.

"As such, APRA expects it to have robust governance and internal controls to support its financial and operational resilience."

"Although the bank remains well capitalised, and benefits from the financial strength of the broader ING group, these breaches are not simply a reporting error."

"When a bank cannot accurately measure one of its most important financial safeguards, it raises fundamental questions about the effectiveness of its risk management and controls. APRA is therefore acting decisively to ensure ING rectifies these weaknesses expediently," Ms McCarthy Hockey said.

Bad news: no RBA digital currency on the horizon

By Daniel Ziffer

The Reserve Bank has released a bit this morning about digital currency and potential future regulation around payment systems.

There's a paper about the consultation on the Role of RITS in Supporting Settlement in a Tokenised Ecosystem, about how tokenisation has the "potential to enhance the efficiency, functionality and resilience of Australia’s wholesale financial markets".

The central bank wants to hear how it's settlement services could support the development and growth of tokenised asset markets and tokenised private money in Australia, while continuing to promote safety, efficiency and financial stability.

It's part of Project Acacia about making sure Australia’s money, payments and settlement arrangements will still work in the future.

There's also a report on a central bank digital currency and bad news for people who want a Koala Coin, it finds:

"There is no clear public interest case for a retail CBDC"

You can read that report here.

Australia now in the leading group of nations on digital currency, senior bank boss says

By Daniel Ziffer

We're hearing more from Dr Bradley Jones, assistant governor (Financial Systems) at the Reserve Bank of Australia who has the lean look of a cyclist and invokes a cycling metaphor to discuss where Australia sits since Project Acacia started the work of moving towards a digital currency (maybe) and digital payment architecture.

"We were at risk of falling out of the lead peloton," he says.

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For non-cyclists, the peloton is the pack. As races stretch on, they often separate out into different groups, further ahead and just hanging on.

"We have absolutely got the attention of the rest of the world here. It's opening up, potentially, new opportunities for international cooperation," he says.

It's about helping to build the international financial architecture of the future, he says.

"This technology is not going to respect borders. We've got a really strong case for a seat at that [global] table."

Inquiring into intergenerational housing inequity

By Gareth Hutchens

These photos of the committee have come through from the ABC's Callum Finn.

Greens senator Barbara Pocock, chair of the committee, speaks to Westpac chief economist Luci Ellis:

Lowe-coin still a long way away

By Daniel Ziffer

I'm at key annual fintech event Intersekt in Melbourne where they're talking about Project Acacia.

That's complicated.

We're talking about the Koala Coin! The Eucalyptus Etherium! The former governor of the Reserve Bank (who started this process) Phil Lowe Coin!

Look, they're still working on the name for our potential digital currency.

Dr Bradley Jones is the assistant governor (financial systems) at the Reserve Bank of Australia. It's a complex discussion. We've already discussed the "fragmentation of liquidity".

Most of the barriers have been barriers to innovation.

"The first issue is just the country has been crying out for mechanisms that are more structured … to facilitate public/private collaboration," he says.

One of the biggest problems? Getting 57 industry participants and the four bodies of the Council of Financial Regulators (The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), and the Department of the Treasury) onto the same page.

They're grinding towards a framework to make it happen. Dr Jones still sees issues around "scalability and resilience" but thinks we'll get to a financial system that better incorporates modernised digital payment systems.

"I don't see any of the barriers as being insurmountable," he says.

Luci Ellis explains how inflation targeting, lower inflation, and banking deregulation have driven property prices higher

By Gareth Hutchens

The discussion at the Senate Committee on Intergenerational Housing Inequity shifted to the question of Australia's extraordinary property price increases in recent decades.

Luci Ellis, Westpac chief economist, who was previously RBA assistant governor (economic), explained how Australia's inflation-targeting framework, which was introduced in the early 1990s, combined with banking deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s, have contributed to the housing price situation we're experiencing in 2020s:

"A large part of the reason why housing prices have increased relative to household incomes over the past 30 years is we now have lower inflation," she said.

"That was deemed to be a good thing."

"And therefore the average level of nominal interest rates is now lower than it was in the 1980s, and that means you can service a bigger mortgage than you could for the same repayment back in the 80s as a share of your income, so the normal mortgage serviceability considerations map into a larger loan size, [and] that then maps into a large deposit relative to your income."

"So a lot of the increase in house prices to household income has been a multi-decade consequence of lower inflation and financial deregulation that happened some decades ago."

"More recently there is this question of demand versus supply."

"We are a country that's very welcoming to migrants. We are therefore a country that has [one of] the faster rates of population growth in the OECD. We therefore have a bigger task in terms of supplying enough housing to house all those residents and we do have a number of constraints on the ability to build enough properties, and that has been pressure on rents, particularly recently, although not so much 10 years ago, and also on house prices."

Telstra pays $277,200 penalty for failing to prevent customers from mobile number scams

By David Chau

Telstra has paid a $277,200 fine for failing to carry out identification verification checks and not doing enough to protect customers who were at risk of mobile number fraud.

Between January and October 2025, there were 15 unauthorised SIM swaps because Telstra failed to follow ID verification authentication processes, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

What is mobile number fraud?

It often occurs when scammers take control of your phone number.

For instance, when the scammer may use your stolen personal details to trick the mobile carrier, Telstra in this case, into porting your phone number to a new SIM card — one which the scammer owns.

Victims will often notice their mobile phone suddenly stops working, and an alert which says "SOS [mode] only".

Other warnings signs include unexpected alerts via text or email about changes to your account details and being locked out of your email, bank or social media accounts.

ACMA investigation

This type of fraud is often perpetrated by criminal syndicates and can result in "devastating financial losses and other impacts for victims", ACMA member Samantha Yorke said in a statement.

“In this case, Telstra’s frontline staff did not follow the provider’s own processes, leaving customers vulnerable to SIM swap scams and other types of mobile fraud,” Ms Yorke said.

ACMA said it also identified 13 instances where Telstra's agents failed to provide additional fraud protections to customers who had either raised concerns or where the telco had information to identify them as being at risk of fraud.

“When a telco becomes aware that a customer is at risk of fraud involving their service it must offer protections that are additional or tailored to the situation,” Ms Yorke said.

“These failures exposed Telstra’s customers to real harm, with customers reporting combined financial losses of at least $39,500 after falling victim to fraud."

Westpac chief economist defends bank profits

By Gareth Hutchens

Luci Ellis, Westpac's chief economist, has been answering questions at the Senate's inquiry on intergenerational housing inequity.

Greens Senator Barbara Pocock, who is chairing the committee, has asked Dr Ellis about the issue of "house hoarding" among richer cohorts, Australia's