Some Banks Want To Consign Credit Card Interest To History
Australian lenders hope no-interest cards can arrest a decline in usage and attract younger customers.
4 min
Interest charges have been one of the defining features of credit cards for decades and so when an employee at a big Australian bank suggested getting rid of them, he was taking a risk.
“He said, ‘Well, what about a no-interest credit card?’ ” said Rachel Slade, personal banking group executive at National Australia Bank Ltd., recalling a feedback session at one of the lender’s Melbourne offices. “And everyone’s like, ‘What? That’s not how a credit card works.’ ”
Worried about dwindling credit-card usage during the coronavirus pandemic and the rapid rise of startups like Australia’s Afterpay Ltd. and Sweden’s Klarna Bank AB that allow consumers to pay for goods in instalments, some banks are rethinking what has been one of their most lucrative businesses.
National Australia Bank, known locally as NAB, launched a no-interest credit card in September. Users get a fixed line of credit and the bank levies a monthly fee, which is refunded if the customer maintains a zero balance and doesn’t use the card. Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the country’s largest lender by market value, also unveiled a no-interest card last year.
The experiment isn’t being replicated in the U.S. where most credit-card issuers charge interest when cardholders carry balances. But if they prove to be successful, Australian banks’ no-interest cards could drive change in other markets.
Fees on the cards offered by NAB and CBA vary according to credit limits. For example, a balance of $1000 Australian dollars on CBA’s no-interest card could accrue nearly $484 in fees over 40 months if there is an outstanding balance each month. The same balance on the NAB card repaid at that product’s minimum rate would cost about $292 over 29 months.
In both cases, that is more than the interest accrued by a customer making the same repayments on a regular card with a 16.6% annual percentage rate, the typical rate in Australia. And like with other cards, customers are required to make minimum monthly repayments on any outstanding balances.
Still, the banks are betting that consumers will like the products for their simplicity. No-interest cards are designed to give customers more control over their spending via a product that is easy to understand, said Angus Sullivan, CBA’s group executive of retail banking services.
According to Australia’s central bank, the country’s credit and charge card balances fell by almost 34% in the two years through October to the equivalent of $21.17 billion. More than 60% of the decline came in March and October last year as the pandemic pushed Australia’s economy into recession.
Over the same period, debit-card transactions locally grew by 4.7% in number and by 5.6% in value, to hit more than the equivalent of nearly $33 billion.
Some analysts view the no-interest cards as a salvo in an intensifying battle for share of the payments market between banks with large credit-card businesses and buy now, pay later providers like Afterpay and Zip Co.
In Australia, buy-now-pay-later services don’t need to verify income or check existing debts held by users, which makes it easier for consumers to gain access to those products than a traditional credit card.
According to their most recent half-yearly filings, Afterpay and Zip respectively count 14% and 9% of Australia and New Zealand’s combined adult populations as customers. The average age of the 3.3 million Australians and New Zealanders using Afterpay at the end of June was 35 and 33, respectively.
Ms Slade said NAB’s no-interest card aims to attract younger customers who don’t necessarily have strong ties to the bank, illustrating a broad concern among traditional lenders that they are losing out in the battle for millennials.
In the three months since launch, the StraightUp card was among NAB’s three most popular credit cards among new applicants. Demand was strongest among customers under 40 years old, the bank said.
Tom Beadle, an analyst at UBS Group AG, said it is unlikely that no-interest credit cards in Australia will be a material threat to the buy now, pay later sector. This is because the consumer still needs to pay for the cards through upfront fees of up to $22 a month.
In contrast, buy now, pay later services often charge no interest and are generally free to users who make payments on time. A survey published by UBS in October found that most buy now, pay later users valued the payment method because it helped them to budget and they considered it convenient.
“The whole beauty of Afterpay is that it’s just really simple: It’s free,” Mr Beadle said. “People just want simplicity, and Afterpay have absolutely nailed that.”
Afterpay and Zip have made no secret that they intend to challenge credit-card providers. In August, Zip said the credit card industry was fundamentally broken, citing high revolving interest, confusing terms, a lack of trust and an absence of brand loyalty that had accelerated a structural decline in usage.
Four years after its debut on Australia’s stock market with a market value of $149 million, Afterpay is now worth US$32.7 billion. Afterpay and Zip are also expanding in the U.S., recording a combined A$7.4 billion Australian dollars in transactions on their networks in the six months through June.
Still, the UBS survey, based on 1,000 respondents, found a “not insignificant proportion” of users appear to regard buy now, pay later as a line of credit. Some 25% of users said they couldn’t afford a product with their existing savings, while 12% said they couldn’t get approval for a credit card.
Australia’s experience could offer lessons to the U.S., where lenders are also seeing a decline in credit-card usage and growth in debit-card usage, although it will take time before banks can be sure no-interest cards are popular.
Credit reporting firm Experian PLC said that U.S. consumer credit card debt in 2020 contracted for the first time in eight years. After hitting a record high of US$829 billion in 2019, balances decreased by 9% in the past year.
At Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., U.S. debit-card dollar payment and purchase volume collectively rose 23% year-over-year in the quarter ended in September, more than double the pre-Covid-19 growth rate; the same measure for credit cards was down 8%.
Some American credit-card issuers are seeking to slow the buy now, pay later industry’s growth in other ways. Late last year, Capital One Financial Corp. stopped their cards from being used to make Afterpay purchases and payments, the Australian company said.
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Geoffrey Hinton hopes the prize will add credibility to his claims about the dangers of AI technology he pioneered
4 min
The newly minted Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has a message about the artificial-intelligence systems he helped create: get more serious about safety or they could endanger humanity.
“I think we’re at a kind of bifurcation point in history where, in the next few years, we need to figure out if there’s a way to deal with that threat,” Hinton said in an interview Tuesday with a Nobel Prize official that mixed pride in his life’s work with warnings about the growing danger it poses.
The 76-year-old Hinton resigned from Google last year in part so he could talk more about the possibility that AI systems could escape human control and influence elections or power dangerous robots. Along with other experienced AI researchers, he has called on such companies as OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Alphabet -owned Google to devote more resources to the safety of the advanced systems that they are competing against each other to develop as quickly as possible.
Hinton’s Nobel win has provided a new platform for his doomsday warnings at the same time it celebrates his critical role in advancing the technologies fueling them. Hinton has argued that advanced AI systems are capable of understanding their outputs, a controversial view in research circles.
“Hopefully, it will make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they’re saying,” he said of the prize.
Hinton’s views have pitted him against factions of the AI community that believe dwelling on doomsday scenarios needlessly slows technological progress or distracts from more immediate harms, such as discrimination against minority groups .
“I think that he’s a smart guy, but I think a lot of people have way overhyped the risk of these things, and that’s really convinced a lot of the general public that this is what we should be focusing on, not the more immediate harms of AI,” said Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, during a panel last year.
Hinton visited Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters Tuesday for an informal celebration, and some of the company’s top AI executives congratulated him on social media.
On Wednesday, other prominent Googlers specialising in AI were also awarded a Nobel Prize. Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, and John M. Jumper, director at the AI lab, were part of a group of three scientists who won the chemistry prize for their work on predicting the shape of proteins.
Thinking like people
Hinton is sharing the Nobel Prize in physics with John Hopfield of Princeton University for their work since the 1980s on neural networks that process information in ways inspired by the human brain. That work is the basis for many of the AI technologies in use today, from ChatGPT’s humanlike conversations to Google Photos’ ability to recognise who is in every picture you take.
“Their contributions to connect fundamental concepts in physics with concepts in biology, not just AI—these concepts are still with us today,” said Yoshua Bengio , an AI researcher at the University of Montreal.
In 2012, Hinton worked with two of his University of Toronto graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, on a neural network called AlexNet programmed to recognise images in photos. Until that point, computer algorithms had often been unable to tell that a picture of a dog was really a dog and not a cat or a car.
AlexNet’s blowout victory at a 2012 contest for image-recognition technology was a pivotal moment in the development of the modern AI boom, as it proved the power of neural nets over other approaches.
That same year, Hinton started a company with Krizhevsky and Sutskever that turned out to be short-lived. Google acquired it in 2013 in an auction against competitors including Baidu and Microsoft, paying $44 million essentially to hire the three men, according to the book “Genius Makers.” Hinton began splitting time between the University of Toronto and Google, where he continued research on neural networks.
Hinton is widely revered as a mentor for the current generation of top AI researchers including Sutskever, who co-founded OpenAI before leaving this spring to start a company called Safe Superintelligence.
Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award, a computer-science prize, for his work on neural networks alongside Bengio and a fellow AI researcher, Yann LeCun . The three are often referred to as the modern “godfathers of AI.”
Warnings of disaster
By 2023, Hinton had become alarmed about the consequences of building more powerful artificial intelligence. He began talking about the possibility that AI systems could escape the control of their creators and cause catastrophic harm to humanity. In doing so, he aligned himself with a vocal movement of people concerned about the existential risks of the technology.
“We’re in a situation that most people can’t even conceive of, which is that these digital intelligences are going to be a lot smarter than us, and if they want to get stuff done, they’re going to want to take control,” Hinton said in an interview last year.
Hinton announced he was leaving Google in spring 2023, saying he wanted to be able to freely discuss the dangers of AI without worrying about consequences for the company. Google had acted “very responsibly,” he said in an X post.
In the subsequent months, Hinton has spent much of his time speaking to policymakers and tech executives, including Elon Musk , about AI risks.
Hinton cosigned a paper last year saying companies doing AI work should allocate at least one-third of their research and development resources to ensuring the safety and ethical use of their systems.
“One thing governments can do is force the big companies to spend a lot more of their resources on safety research, so that for example companies like OpenAI can’t just put safety research on the back burner,” Hinton said in the Nobel interview.
An OpenAI spokeswoman said the company is proud of its safety work.
With Bengio and other researchers, Hinton supported an artificial-intelligence safety bill passed by the California Legislature this summer that would have required developers of large AI systems to take a number of steps to ensure they can’t cause catastrophic damage. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently vetoed the bill , which was opposed by most big tech companies including Google.
Hinton’s increased activism has put him in opposition to other respected researchers who believe his warnings are fantastical because AI is far from having the capability to cause serious harm.
“Their complete lack of understanding of the physical world and lack of planning abilities put them way below cat-level intelligence, never mind human-level,” LeCun wrote in a response to Hinton on X last year.
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