eftpos
Australia's domestic debit card network, which has competed with Visa and Mastercard on the same piece of plastic for decades.
The name stands for electronic funds transfer at point of sale, and it began in the mid-1980s as the banks' own links between shop terminals and accounts. For a long time the system had no single owner; it got one in 2009 with eftpos Payments Australia, and in 2022 it merged with the NPP operator and BPAY into Australian Payments Plus. In New Zealand the word simply means the card terminal.
Most Australian debit cards are dual-network, carrying eftpos alongside an international scheme. Because eftpos is often cheaper for merchants, the question of who picks the route — issuer, merchant or customer — became a running fight at the Reserve Bank. The answer was least-cost routing: merchants may send the purchase over the cheaper network.