Financial services sector feels the buzz of disruption
If Australia has been a hotbed of disruption, across all industries, the financial services sector has been the hot water bottle in the hotbed. From the days when the likes of Pepper, Wizard, Aussie Home Loans and Liberty Financial first began to offer alternative sources of home loans to the major banks, through the emergence of alternative payment systems such as PayPal, to the attack by the likes of OzForex and Pepperstone on the banks' foreign exchange business, to the savaging of the traditional full-service stockbrokers' lucrative client relationships by online brokers, through to the Australian Securities Exchange itself having its stock-trading monopoly disrupted by the broker-owned Chi-X, the financial services sector has buzzed with the hum of disruption.