Australian banks and deposit-taking institutions are being urged to be early adopters of the country’s new payments platform (NPP).

 

Australia’s NPP is currently scheduled to launch in mid-2017 and promises to transform the Australian payments landscape. While the NPP shares the commitment to speed, availability, and convenience common among other countries with similar immediate payment schemes in place, it also has unique characteristics and capabilities that will create specific opportunities for Australian financial institutions.

 

Along with the core objective of enabling immediate payments, the NPP is designed to enable the evolution of future capabilities, including new data, new flows, and new customer solutions. To take advantage of this, financial institutions should begin the journey to immediate payments now, laying the necessary groundwork and examining the options available to them.

 

“The NPP is shaping up to be an opportunity for financial institutions to provide new, innovative, and responsive services to business and retail customers across banking segments and channels,” says David Brown, senior vice-president of global payments, and co-author of this white paper. “Banks that recognize the opportunity and act early will be well-positioned to excel in the industry’s new immediate payments landscape.”

 

Fundtech provides immediate/faster payments capabilities as a module of its global payments solution. The solution accommodates individual and bulk domestic payments schemes whose turn-around time, from issuance of a customer’s original instruction to the bank’s final response, must happen in near real-time.