Nine more financial organisations - including PayPal - have signed up to fund and participate in the development of Australia's New Payments Platform, which is being developed to facilitate inter-bank real time settlement. The Australian Payments Clearing Association, which is steering the initiative with the support of KPMG (which was appointed as lead consultant on the program earlier this year), announced yesterday that the initial participants of the group - the four big banks along with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, Cuscal and the Reserve Bank - have now been joined by a further nine organisations. These are: Australian Settlements Limited; Bank of America; Bank of Queensland Limited; Indue; HSBC; ING; Macquarie Bank; PayPal and Suncorp. The 17-strong group held a two-day meeting this week to work out how to proceed with the NPP.According to Tony Richards, head of payments policy for the RBA, the NPP is a hub-centric design intended to be "more conducive to new entrants and innovation." Richards said that he believed the NPP's 2016 deadlines were "ambitious but achievable." However, he acknowledged that establishing a central addressing database (which would allow people to transfer funds knowing only the recipient's email address or mobile telephone number) and adopting the ISO 20022 messaging protocols could be a "bit more challenging."Speaking at the Future of Digital Payments conference in Sydney yesterday, Richards said the organisation was now close to announcing its final proposal. APCA's head of industry policy, Dr Brad Pragnell, said that a tender was likely to be issued in early 2014, but APCA would be announcing the NPP's new independent chair in a matter of weeks. At present, use of the NPP remains limited to ADIs, although Richards noted that there "is the facility for other approved entities to connect."Pragnell said that the model developed clearly separates the payments infrastructure layer from the overlay services that uses it so as to promote innovation "over the coming decades." The extent of the real-time nature of the network was also revealed, as Richards said that the NPP was being designed to complete a transfer in 15 seconds or less.While that is fast, it's not as real time as, say, share market trading systems, for which just milliseconds of delay are the norm.Jim Mortimer, head of international propositions for VocaLink, which built the UK's Faster Payments Service, also spoke at the conference.He said the UK's FPS now had 25 million active customers, a figure he predicted would double in the next three years. VocaLink is a likely bidder for the NPP, along with its local Australian partners Accenture and First Data.Mortimer said that VocaLink was in the final stages of building a proxy database in the UK that will allow bank customers to transfer funds using only a mobile telephone number or email address. A similar capability is envisioned for the NPP.A further VocaLink innovation - codenamed Zapp - is being developed, an online and mobile commerce platform that again operates using the Faster Payments Service infrastructure."While we would not expect