Australian Payments Plus (AP+) welcomes the risk assessment published this morning by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) into the planned decommissioning of the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS).
“The RBA’s risk assessment provides the payments industry with a clear pathway to manage this modernisation of Australia’s payment system that will benefit Australia’s consumers, businesses and governments. We welcome the report and the recommendations it makes,” said Lynn Kraus, CEO of AP+.
“The planned decommissioning of BECS and migration to the NPP presents a unique opportunity to efficiently modernise our payments system and to support the long-term competitiveness and productivity of Australia’s economy,” added Kraus.
Australia’s real-time payment platform, the NPP, which went live in 2018, today processes more than 30% of account-to-account payments. To support the movement of the remaining 70% of BECS payments to the NPP, AP+ has, since early 2024, commenced an extensive program of work to ensure the NPP has the products, capability, capacity, reach and resilience to easily handle these volumes of transactions in real time.
The majority of transactions remaining on BECS are so-called bulk, or batch files. Most of these bulk files contain less than 10 payments each which can easily be sent today via the NPP. For the relatively small share of very large bulk files, used by a small number of government and corporate customers, AP+ is working closely with the industry to develop an NPP Multi-Credit Transfer service that will support the processing of these unique payment files.
In addition to ongoing capability and product enhancements, AP+ is focused on growing awareness of the NPP and its benefits, along with providing the education and mobilisation needed by users of BECS across governments, industry and businesses to support the transition.
AP+ recently created a Move to NPP Steering Committee to ensure a robust level of oversight and governance for this important industry initiative, with an independent Chair, Geoff Summerhayes. In addition to industry representatives, the Committee will include observers from the RBA and Commonwealth Treasury.
Together with Australian Payments Network (AusPayNet), the operator of BECS, AP+ has recently submitted a request for authorisation to the ACCC to enable AP+, AusPayNet, the RBA and the Commonwealth Treasury to help drive the overall industry coordination that the RBA has called for in today’s report.
“Five years remain until the proposed BECS decommissioning date in 2030, and while we’re seeing growing momentum across the payments industry, there is a lot more to be done to transition the remaining BECS payments to the NPP. The RBA’s early validation of the work underway and tasks yet to be done, is extremely valuable at this stage in the migration,” said Kraus.
“Today’s report underscores AP+’s investment in the NPP and the steps that we have put in place over the last 12 months to deliver the next generation of account-to-account payments for all Australians – and we look forward to the ongoing role that the RBA intends to play in this journey over the next five years.”
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