AP+ came together in February 2022, bringing BPAY Group, eftpos Australia and NPP Australia into one consolidated entity to shape the future of payments for Australia.
Our vision is to deliver more innovation to Australia’s payments ecosystem, so that Australian businesses, government and consumers experience more benefits, in more ways.
This is the first edition of the AP+ consolidated product roadmap that we have developed through a comprehensive industry consultation during 2023. The creation of a single roadmap for AP+ activities that require member development delivers increased certainty for AP+ members and supports their plan more effectively.
Our strategy on a page
AP+ aims to consolidate the product set on top of two rails: eftpos and NPP, with an initiation alternative to NFC as a key industry enabler
This roadmap highlights key industry and regulatory requirements along with other major AP+ activities. Work on initiatives that are under exploration will continue and may be brought onto future roadmaps. We expect to publish subsequent versions of the product roadmap annually.
AP+ Product Roadmap 2024
The 2024 product roadmap includes key industry regulatory requirements and other AP+ activities
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BECS retirement: To prepare for the retirement of BECS in 2030, we’re ensuring NPP has the reach, capacity and resilience to easily manage the expected volume of Direct Entry migration. This work also includes driving the following initiatives:
- NPP ISO version upgrade – we are upgrading the version of ISO20022 that the NPP runs on to benefit from improvements in the message schema. This includes software integrations that can leverage international vendors and usage that includes innovations adopted in other markets.
- NPP cloud migration – this will allow directly connected Participants the option to integrate their back office with the NPP Basic Infrastructure via public cloud providers.
- COIN migration to TNS: The underlying network of COIN (Community Of Interest Network) is changing from Telstra to TNS.
- Mobile Least Cost Routing (LCR): The industry is expected to support mobile LCR by the end of 2024.
- 3DES migration to AES: Australian card payments will be migrated from 3DES to a new encryption standard (AES) by 2030.
- International Payments Service (IPS) – NPP is already available to NPP participants for the final domestic leg of inbound international payments, allowing consumers and businesses to receive funds faster and giving banks greater visibility and control from a financial crime perspective. This will also be made available to NPP Identified Institutions in 2024.
- eftpos tokenisation: AP+ is developing a solution to support merchant tokenisation to enhance security by increasingly removing card numbers from the ecosystem. This will provide better protection of card numbers when storing credentials with merchants, helping to reduce fraud.
- QR Acceptance: Our goal is to enable initiation for in-store payments using any smart device, initially via QR. It aims to provide consumers with a greater variety of services at the point of sale and integrate other experiences such as loyalty programs or simplified integrated initiation.
- Confirmation of Payee for BSB/Account Number Payments (COP): This focuses on providing payers with the ability to view the payee’s name or account matching prior to making a payment. This allows consumers to check they are paying the correct person and is likely to help combat fraud/scams and avoid mistaken payments.
- NPP PayTo Porting: Allow consumers to port PayTo agreements more easily between financial institutions without having to contact each merchant and re-agree to a mandate. This will reduce the impact on merchants when consumers change banks.
- Osko / SCT Harmonisation: This brings together the BPAY OSKO overlay service with Single Credit Transfer (SCT) NPP product to simplify real-time payments into a single service, with a clear brand and value proposition, streamlined rules and associated operational processes.
- eftpos to Update to 3DS 2.3: AP+ plans to support 3DS 2.3 to help reduce card abandonment rates and provide enhanced risk management.
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