The processing of bulk payments on the NPP is near the top of the agenda for the New Payments Platform, or at least its participating financial institutions.NPP Australia yesterday "published details of its ongoing investment in the NPP, to extendand enhance the capability of the platform to meet the needs of participating financial institutions, payment providers and users within the wider payments ecosystem".It's a progressive document but reinforces cynicism at the banking industry's commitment to prioritise and fulfil payments reforms crowded out by a multitude of other, pricey projects with a compliance theme.BPAY Group (owned and funded by pretty much the same banks behind NPPA) "remains committed to ensuring that the promise of the Initial Convenience Service is met," the roadmap says. BPAY Group, says the final page of the roadmap on Osko matters, "is ready to complete the rollout of the remaining Osko capabilities, which deliver significant value for Osko enabled Financial Institutions and their customers." "The enabling technology is complete, including product standards, technical specifications, certification platform and certificate authority."There will be "three distinct releases" to make Osko more useful:• Release 1 - Requests for social and tax compliant invoicing• Release 2 - Enhanced business requests• Release 3 - Payments and requests with documents.Current plans are to commence implementation of release 1 in late 2019, NPPA said."However, committed funding and priority within NPP participants remains challenging, particularly in the context of other significant payments initiatives on the NPP and elsewhere."BPAY Group continues to work with NPPA and NPP participants to align on an appropriately prioritised and funded plan, including the potential to fast-track implementation with a subset of participants and high-volume users such as government agencies."While there are now five fintechs deeply engaged with the NPP, the 100s of other fintech hopefuls may bristle at the "future native capability development on the NPP" and the three-year timeline set out in the roadmap.NPPA's capability roadmap between now and the end of 2022 includes:•    development of NPP message standards to utilise the structured data capabilities of the NPP;•    development of a 'Mandated Payments Service' to support recurring and 'debit-like' payments on the NPP;•    a "Basic Payment Initiation Service";•    services to support the domestic leg of an inbound cross-border payments;•    supporting the use of QR codes on the NPP; and•    extension of the NPP API framework and an upgrade of the API sandbox.There's an outline of the inertia that favours banking incumbents in the roadmap."Based on NPPA's experience, the vast majority of organisations want to use the NPP in a manner similar to the way they access existing payment systems today via their financial institution," NPPA says. "This requires a commercial relationship with only one participating financial institution as payment messages sent via one financial institution can reach all of the available accounts on the NPP."Meanwhile, the number and value of transactions through the NPP "have grown steadily since launch," the roadmap reports. Around 3.6 million PayIDs have been registered, with this number growing at an average of 100,000 per month."As