Bank account portability appeals to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) as a bright prospect for encouraging the entry of more competition in the banking industry.

This emerged as the Senate inquiry on banking reforms got underway on Friday, where ASIC senior executive Greg Kirk expressed his openness on the possibility of adapting mobile bank accounts for Australian bank clients.

Kirk testified before the senate committee that the proposed portable bank accounts carry with it advantages that customers can enjoy though he admitted that he is yet to grasp the basics of the plan and ASIC itself has yet to obtain independent data about the system.

The ASIC executive also echoed sentiments that currently in-placed banking system in the country discourages many customers to ditch their present bank providers and look for a better deal.

Kirk said that change indeed is needed in the present environment as he stressed that "the relationships that customers have with their bank and the arrangements that they have in place with payments to third parties, make it necessarily complex to switch banks."

The whole idea of bank switching, according to Kirk, would become a breeze once the plan proves feasible and implementable, that is "if you just switched your whole account and you moved your number across and everything that was attached to that number moved across automatically."

However, Kirk opted to defer his official take on the proposal at this time, which he said may prove premature in light of the ongoing review on the issues bedevilling the banking sector being conducted by former Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) governor Bernie Fraser.

Fraser has been tapped by the federal government to look deeper on the problems that confront the industry, prior to the actual implementation of the banking reforms that the government revealed in late December 2010.