After the success of last year’s inaugural event, this week, Beyond Tomorrow returned for its second year—bigger, bolder, and sold out once again. With 450+ delegates, 30 speakers, and thought-provoking discussions, this year’s theme, “Unleashing Opportunities”, set the stage for conversations on the future of payments in Australia.  

As AP+ recently celebrated its third birthday, we continue to evolve from our roots in eftpos, BPAY and NPP into a unified domestic payments provider. Our journey is not just about maintaining and protecting payments infrastructure, it’s about shaping the future of payments in Australia. 

Over the past year, we’ve made great progress in several key areas.  

One important milestone is the availability of eftpos and least cost routing in mobile wallets. This time last year, these two features were not available in mobile wallets, which now account for 40% of in-person transactions. That has changed with the ongoing roll-out of eftpos and least cost routing to both Apple Pay and Google Wallet since September 2024, helping lower the cost of payment acceptance. 

ConnectID is continuing to grow, with the four major banks in Australia – Commonwealth Bank (CBA), National Australia Bank (NAB), ANZ (through ANZ Plus) and Westpac – now offering ConnectID to their customers, and use cases broadening across a range of businesses from real estate to HR and financial services. 

In account-to-account payments, PayTo is now available on Amazon and Red Energy. With many merchants keen to support customers whichever way they wish to pay, including directly from their bank account, it is important that we evolve accordingly and offer those varied payment options. 

We are also seeing momentum build around the broader industry shift towards real-time payments. The NPP already processes 30% of account-to-account transactions, accelerating the push toward the 2030 BECS decommissioning target. The recent RBA Risk Assessment reinforced the urgency of the industry work to support this transition to ensure that businesses, governments and consumers alike are prepared for the shift to the NPP real-time payments network.  

With so much progress made, but also so much more to come, I’m excited to think about all that’s going to be possible beyond tomorrow. As an industry we’re well positioned to start unleashing all that opportunity over the next five to ten years, and the panels and discussions at Beyond Tomorrow were all about how we are going to achieve that vision of Australia’s payments future.  

In my fireside chat with Brad Jones, Assistant Governor of the RBA, we explored the evolving role of surcharging in a largely cashless world, the roadmap for BECS decommissioning, and the future central bank digital currency.  

A dedicated panel delved into the modernisation of payments and its transformative impact on businesses, consumers, and governments. This was followed by some real-world case studies for PayTo, where we heard directly from end-users how they are leveraging the power of PayTo’s real-time, always-on, data-rich capabilities.  

In the afternoon, our Chief Payments & Schemes Officer, Adrian Lovney, hosted a late-night show style “eftpos show”, looking at how lowering the cost of payments creates value, as well as a forward-view on the integration of payments and identity, and its potential to reshape the way we transact in Australia. 

Renowned international speaker and author David Birch set the stage for a panel discussion on digital identity, taking us through a range of local and global use cases. David took the stage a second time shortly after to discuss how AI-driven agents are reshaping how consumers shop, pay and interact. And Tālis Putniņš, Chief Scientist for Digital Finance CRC, explored how payments would have to change to meet the need of the market for tokenised assets.  

It was an inspiring and future-focused event, that we hope sparked fresh thinking and has left our attendees excited for what the future of payments holds.  

I’d like to thank all of our sponsors – Our platinum sponsor – Zepto; our gold sponsors – AWS, NAB and Ping Identity; our silver sponsors – Bolt, Cuscal, Endava and FIS; ACI Worldwide and Monoova, sponsors of the Coffee Cart; and Swift, sponsor of our lunch, as well as our host Gemma Acton, Binowee Bayles for her Welcome to Country, Jelena Dokic for her motivational closing remarks, and our guests for bringing their insights, experiences, and probing questions to each session.  

A big thank you to the AP+ team for their dedication in making Beyond Tomorrow such a success. The conversations sparked at this event will help shape the next phase of our industry’s evolution, and we look forward to continuing the journey—unleashing opportunities beyond tomorrow. 

See you next year! 

Lynn Kraus

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