Australia’s New Payments Platform launches to lukewarm welcome
(14 February 2018 – Australia) Australia’s latest payment infrastructure, the New Payments Platform (NPP) has gone live this week, however the Commonwealth Bank of Australia is the only major provider to offer it to customers at launch.
Banks and other financial service providers have contributed the development of the NPP alongside the federal government and Reserve Bank since 2012.
Thirteen participating banks have been trialing the technology internally since November 2017, with an additional 50 financial institutions expect to get access to the NPP through the core group.
Despite this, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is the major provider to fully offer the platform to customers at launch. NPP Australia said the platform's rollout to individual banks would depend on their own "timings and plans".
The bank said customers could now register their mobile number as their PayID through the CommBank app.
ANZ Bank is holding off on rolling the NPP out to its customers while it undertakes "rigorous testing" of the platform. "We will be announcing how we will roll out real-time payments to all our customers across Australia in the coming weeks," its spokeperson told reporters.
Meanwhile, Westpac had indicated that the NPP would be available to core consumer customers from launch, but revised that to "in the coming weeks" and for a "small group" of consumer customers.
NAB expects to roll out the NPP to customer “within the next month” according to head of deposits and transaction services Rachel Slade.
“The new payments platform has a unique layered 'open access' design which allows for different entities to leverage the platform’s functionality in different way," Lovney said in a statement.
"Innovative organisations can choose to build upon the platform’s capabilities to develop and launch ‘overlay services’ on the platform.
"These could be payments experiences, or they could be business applications that enable significant organisational efficiencies."
Additionally, the platform will allow third party services to run on top of the NPP such as bank-owned BPay’s Osko.
Osko allows consumers to transfer money to someone via their mobile phone number or email address in real-time, all day, every day. Further, the platform will enable them to attach a 280-character description with their payment.
Osko utilises the PayID component of the NPP that lets individuals register an easy-to-remember identifier - like email or phone number - to their bank account.
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