The Australian government is considering new laws that would standardise regulation across the digital payments industry and likely encompass the payment services of Apple, Google, and Chinese tech giant WeChat. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is considering recommendations from a recently published report—Payments System Review—that considered whether the old regulatory architecture for digital payments set up in the 1990s was keeping up with changes in the space. Currently, digital wallet services such as Apply Pay, Google Pay, and China’s WeChat Pay, are not designated as “payment services provider” under Australian law, placing them outside the regulatory framework. “Ultimately, if we do nothing to reform the current framework, it will be Silicon Valley alone that determines the future of our payments system, a critical piece of our economic infrastructure,” Frydenberg wrote in an op-ed published in the Australian Financial Review. According to the treasurer, Australians carry out 55 million digital payments per day, …