Australian Payments Plus (AP+) supports the Government’s Strategic Plan for the Australian Payments System. The plan is critical for driving simplification, consolidation and cost efficiency in the Australian payments system while enhancing its safety and resilience.
AP+ CEO, Lynn Kraus says:
‘This strategic plan will help drive the modernisation and simplification of the Australian payments system. AP+ is ready to play its role in this process. The robustness of the New Payments Platform (NPP) in handling large volumes of real time transactions is well established with continual increases in both the volume and value of transactions. The transition of BECS to NPP has been discussed for some time and we welcome the movement towards setting a clear timeframe for this.
‘The development of the NPP was a great example of the payments industry collaborating for the good of Australia. As a member-owned organisation, AP+ sits at the heart of that collaboration and we look forward to continuing to partner across the industry to ensure a safe and smooth transition of BECS payments to the NPP.
‘The NPP provides the ability to make data rich payments. This means services like PayID are playing an increasing role in ensuring everyone knows exactly who they are transferring money to. This is vital in the prevention of scams and fraud.
‘With Digital ID, we fully support an interoperable system for Australia and expect ConnectID will play an important role in that.
‘Through BPAY and eftpos, we have long played a role in ensuring Australian consumers and businesses can transfer money safely and efficiently. We’re looking forward to continuing to do that for years to come.’
Migrating BECS to NPP
NPP has already seen BECS volume move over with 27% of account-to-account payments occurring on the NPP today.
AP+ has a comprehensive programme of work underway helping the industry migrate BECS payments to NPP in a considered and managed manner. This work is focused on a range of aspects including capacity planning, account reach and platform resilience.
The rollout of NPP’s PayTo service will play an important role in facilitating the migration of BECS payments to the NPP, with direct debit migration being an anticipated early use case for PayTo. Over 50 million accounts are already enabled for PayTo and we expect to see the majority of NPP reachable accounts enabled for PayTo by July. This means the majority of retail banking customers will be able to authorise and manage PayTo agreements within their banking channels by that time.
Overall NPP has seen continued growth in both the volume and value of transfers made. According to RBA data*:
- NPP handled close to 1. 2billion real time payments in 2022 (up 24% on 2021)
- Total payments were worth over $1.29 trillion (up 30% on 2021)
- In the first quarter of 2023 total transactions were up 21% on the same period in 2022, with
total value up 27% on the same period in 2022. - The single biggest payment transferred in real time was for over $39 billion.
*Source: RBA Retail Payments Statistics 2021-2023 (Schedule c6.1)
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