Key Points:
A bank tipping its pricing strategy to competitors and
testing how they might respond, without committing itself to
action, will get the ACCC interested.
Australia's competition watchdog the ACCC has started giving
some indication on how it will enforce the
new price signalling laws in the banking industry –
and it seems to be a commonsense approach.
Price signalling is behaviour that falls short of collusion but
involves communicating or signalling a company's price rises or
some other initiative to its competitors for the purpose of having
them follow. The new laws in the Competition and Consumer Act 2010
come into effect on June 6, and will , at this stage, only affect
banks and other ADIs in relation to services such as the taking of
deposits and making advances of money or loans. They will not be
able to disclose prices to competitors in private where doing so is
not in the ordinary course of business.
