How a Digital Platform is Changing the Way Australia Does Payments
2020-05-21In just over two years, a shared payments platform in Australia has revolutionized the way consumers, businesses and government agencies both make and receive payments.
New Payments Platform Australia—an organization mutually owned by 13 financial service providers—launched its New Payments Platform (NPP) in February 2018. Designed to support a 24/7 modern, digital economy, the NPP allows financial institutions to connect to a shared platform where their accountholders can make and receive payments.
By April 2020, dozens of credit unions, mutual banks and building societies were among the 90 financial institutions with more than 67 million accountholders using the NPP. Close to 20% of all payments between accounts now travel via the NPP, which processes an average of 1.3 million payments worth more than AU $4 billion each day.
Most single payments, which would previously have been sent via a bulk electronic clearing system, are now being automatically routed by financial institutions over the NPP. The NPP also allows credit union members and other accountholders to set up their own unique PayID—which is linked to their account. Approximately 4.7 million PayIDs have been registered, with this number growing at 180,000 per month.
Innovative use-cases that tap into the NPP’s core capabilities have also started to emerge, including:
- independent payments solutions providers.
- a service that enables employees to access their income as they earn it in real-time.
- a consumer-to-business payment service that uses the NPP’s speed and PayID to deliver real-time validation and processing for online payments.
- combining the NPP’s speed with blockchain to create equity management, compliance and share registry services.
The NPP is also helping the Australian Government respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by supporting real-time payments to government agencies charged with delivering policies and programs related to the crisis.
In the future, New Payments Platform Australia is committed to extending and enhancing the capability of the platform to meet the needs of participating financial institutions, payment providers and users of the wider payments’ ecosystem, whether it be for retail P2P payments or more complex B2B payments.
“We’re focused on developing additional native capability that can support a range of use cases, which can be used by participating financial institutions and third parties to do different things. By developing native platform capability, governed by a common rules’ framework administered by NPPA, it is akin to providing ‘building blocks’ that others can put together in different ways to deliver payment products and services outside the platform,” said NPPA CEO Adrian Lovney.
You can learn more about the New Payments Platform and NPPA’s roadmap for the future by clicking here.