Australia’s retail banking sector and payment systems operators will have nowhere to hide as they face up to reveal public outage severity figures or manipulate up-time performance stats as regulators attempt to arrest crippling software glitches.

The Payment Systems Board – whose members include the chairs of the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority – said it will make public the outage data it collects.

Ironically the move comes after millions of Australians spent Monday waiting for funds to finally clear, four days after a massive outage at the Commonwealth Bank.

This appears to have been due to widespread dependence on legacy batch systems by the other Big Four banks and smaller institutions.

“Following a sharp jump in outages recently, the [RBA] will be looking to take additional steps to encourage improved operational resilience,” the Payment System’s Board annual report said.

“To strengthen transparency and market discipline, the [RBA] will be working with Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA) and the industry to develop a standardised set of statistics on operational outages in retail payments, to be publicly disclosed by individual institutions.”