ASIC's "snapshot of the market" in a sector review of credit cards yesterday drew on data from 12 institutions, including mutuals Bank Australia and BankFirst.
There were, ASIC said in its sample:
• over 14 million open credit card accounts (an increase of over 300,000 since July 2012);
• outstanding balances totalling almost A$45 billion (an increase since 2012, although balances showed signs of seasonal variation); and
• outstanding balances on cards where interest was being charged totalling $31.7 billion (a decline from over $33 billion in 2012).
Consumers were charged approximately $1.5 billion in fees over the previous year, including annual fees, late payment fees and other amounts for credit card use, ASIC said.
"Our exercise indicated that 12.3 million people owned the 21.4 million cards in the dataset," it reported.
"There is a difference between the number of people and the number of credit cards because the linking exercise identified those consumers who were highly likely to have more than one card.
"Most consumers had only one credit card between 2012 and 2017: 62.1 per cent of cards were not linked to any other card. Consumers with multiple cards generally had two cards. The linking exercise indicated that less than 5 per cent of consumers had five or more credit cards between 2012 and 2017."
The RBA's own recent study on banking fees more broadly in Australia noted that "fee income from credit cards continued to be the largest single source of banks' fee income from households."
The increase in fee income from credit cards reported by the RBA for in 2017 "was driven by an increase in income from foreign currency conversion fees - which reflected higher transaction volumes - and income from late payment fees.
"Account-servicing fee income also increased, with some banks reinstating annual fees for products where these fees had previously been waived. In addition, there was a strong increase in unit fees on credit cards, with some banks increasing annual fees on both rewards and non-rewards cards."
Heavy use by consumers of credit cards is central to a related fruit of the bank revenue mix.
Growth in business fee income at banks, the RBA said, "was driven by increases in merchant service fees on card transactions".