AusPayNet and Australian Payments Plus have laid out a consultation process to develop an industry vision for the future of account-to-account payments.
The consultation is primarily framed around the pressing need to develop a roadmap for the replacement of the Bulk Electronic Clearing System by 2030.
In 2024, BECS facilitated 3.5 billion payments worth $17.4 trillion, almost 90 per cent of Australian retail A2A payments value.
BECS is a payment system that processes payments in batch and has been in operation for more than 30 years. It is currently the only A2A payment system in Australia that offers batch capability.
A central controversy is whether the New Payments Platform will be able to develop a batch processing function, which it currently lacks.
The Reserve Bank of Australia in March, in its risk assessment on the planned decommissioning of BECS, said “the target end state for A2A payments in Australia has not been defined.”
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The AusPayNet and AP+ paper yesterday on a consultation process is a step in this direction.
For its part, the RBA yesterday published a complementary Public Interest Framework for a Successful Account-to-Account Payments System.
“In the RBA’s view, the public interest for A2A payments can be best served by the payments industry delivering a system that meets the needs of end users at large” the RBA said.
“A centrepiece of the framework is therefore the achievement of key end-user objectives. Achieving these objectives requires consideration of the end-to-end A2A payments experience, which depends on the performance of the relevant payments infrastructures (including all payments clearing ‘rails’ and settlement systems) as well as customer-facing payments services.
“Because end-user expectations and external conditions evolve, the ecosystem will need to adapt and innovate to continue to meet end-user objectives over time.
“Considering the long-term structural forces affecting payments (i.e. those likely to have an impact beyond 2030) in the work to determine a vision will be important for ‘future proofing’ the A2A payment system as much as possible.”
The RBA made clear, in a nod to its thinking on the desirability of a long-term use case for a BECS replacement, that “the system [must be] capable of meeting user needs, with current use cases such as single credit transfers, direct debit, bulk, time-dependent payments and international payments being an indicator of these needs.”
In 2024, the NPP processed 1.63 billion transactions in real time with a total value of over $2 trillion.
The NPP now accounts for one in three account-to-account payments.
More than 27 million PayIDs are registered, while 114 million accounts can make and receive NPP payments.