Bayly AndrewHon ANDREW BAYLY (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): Thank you Mr Speaker. As the Minister for manufacturing I would dearly love to continue to talk about the impact of high electricity crop prices on manufacturing but what I'd like to talk about today is that yesterday the Commerce Commission released its final report on personal banking. First of all I'd just like to acknowledge the hard work of the Commerce Commission. It's one of the four studies that they've undertaken and they came up with some very valuable insights. And I think the first thing I should say is that the ComCom or Commerce Commission has confirmed what many people know that simply we are not getting a good enough service and pricing in New Zealand from our banks and for our banking services.Of course many of us will know that the banking sector is dominated by four large banks that have just over 90 percent of the market. The key purpose of the report by the Commerce Commission was to look at whether that structure was working well and particularly from the perspective of whether it was promoting competition. To put it simply the Commerce Commission found that it's not. That is the issue that the Government has now got to grapple with. I think one of the key messages that Dr John Small and his team identified is that there is price matching going on in the banking sector not price competition. That is a significant issue and that is as a result of insignificant or far from substantial competition factors coming into play.Now the Government—just to put it on the record—is intending to implement all 14 recommendations. But I just wanted to go through what the component parts—and they fall into seven different parts of recommendations. The first one is that the Commerce Commission recommended to the Minister of Finance that we look at the prudential arrangements for banks and specifically enabling fintechs to get access and to get established more quickly. There's a high requirement for capital at the moment it's minimum $30 million and there is a recommendation about reducing that quantum to make it much easier for fintechs to be able to do that.There's also the issue of making sure that when it comes to the productive sector—and particularly areas like agriculture which I know member Miles Anderson will be talking about soon—it is important that they are not disadvantaged. That's the first thing.The second thing again to the Minister of Finance was about making changes to the Kiwibank arrangements to make sure that it's a much more competitive organisation and in essence to be a disruptor to the industry.The third one was about removing the impediments to the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act or CCCFA—the infamous CCCFA Act—and I'll talk about that briefly. Thirdly about bringing into play open banking at pace dealing with anti - money-laundering which Minister McKee—and I see her here—is dealing with in the third quarter priority for the Government. The sixth one is addressing issues relating to mortgage advisers and that was one of the revelations out of this final report. And seventh was about improving access to better banking services—particularly for Māori but also for people who are very vulnerable: those who've come out of prison those who are not financially aware. That was a very important part of the recommendations which has seen to have just been slightly lost in the telling. So I do acknowledge that there is a banking inquiry underway in conjunction between the Finance and Expenditure Committee and the Primary Production Committee but it is an important piece of work.I just want to talk about a couple of things. The mortgage advisers—one of the revelations that I said is that many mortgage advisers are tied to specific banks. They do not actually go and get the best deal for everyone they get the best deal of who they have a relationship with. There's a very distinct Commission structure and I am in the process of writing to the FMA Financial Markets Authority to make sure that there should be transparency around the Commission arrangements as part of the CoFI or conduct of financial institutions bill that we're progressing and putting in place more arrangements.But the big area is open banking. This is my prime absolute focus. We've introduced the customer and data rights bill but what we need to do is put in place all the institutional arrangements as quickly as possible.