The latest NPP Roadmap, released with a typical absence of fanfare on Monday, clarifies the progress the industry-owned New Payments Platform has made this year and its forever loose plans for 2021.
• More than 72 million account holders are able to make and/or receive NPP payments, with six million added over the last year “and over 1.5 - 2 million more accounts are scheduled to be enabled in 2021.”
• Over 100 banks, credit unions, building societies and fintechs are connected to the NPP, eleven directly and over 90 indirectly. This includes five non-bank organisations “who have chosen to connect indirectly to offer NPP payment services to their customer base”.
• More than 20 per cent of account-to-account credit payments are now done via the NPP, many assumed to be B2B.
• As transaction volumes grow, the NPP wholesale transaction cost “continues to decline” and is now below 10 cents.
• The number of PayIDs registered now exceeds 5.4 million : “This number has increased by 36 per cent since the start of this year, with an average of 150,000 PayID registrations added every month.
• 45 per cent of people use PayID at least once a week to send and/or receive payments.
The latest NPP Roadmap includes plenty of slow-baking priorities, such as the supplementary Osko overlay services, which the BPAY Group “continues to develop”.
The NPPA said it deferred until April 2021 the implementation date for all NPP banks and clients “are obliged to receive NPP payment messages formatted with additional defined data elements for payroll, tax, superannuation and e-Invoicing”.
In October 2019, NPP Australia announced the Mandated Payments Service, a capability which will enable customers to authorise third parties to initiate payments from their bank accounts using the NPP.
This capability, the NPPA said in their October 2020 Roadmap “is the most frequently requested capability that NPP Australia hears from the market”. But the document is unclear on milestones.
The buy-now, pay later brigade will be eager supporters of the MPS.
“Customers will be able to use their bank account to fund other payment options, such digital wallets and BNPL services, by providing their authorisation to set up their bank account ‘on file’ for frequent or recurring payments,” the NPP said.
Potential MPS users quoted in the Roadmap include Paypa Plane, Quest Payment Systems, Block8 and GoCardless.
The Mandated Payments Service at least earns a soft deadline: All NPP institutions “are required to implement elements of this capability by December 2021” that will enable their customers to authorise new payment arrangements and for the financial institutions to be able to process the associated payments.
“With this in place, it is anticipated that financial institutions will begin to rollout payment initiation services, including to third parties via API’s, in early 2022,” the NPP said.
Lastly, “Supporting international payments” is an NPPA goal with a blend of soft and hard deadlines.
“We anticipate some financial institutions will join the international payments business service over the next 12 months,” the Roadmap says, before turning serious.
In order to create the network effect required for the international payments capability to be useful, “all NPP participating financial institutions are obliged to join the international payments business service and receive inbound international payments via the NPP by December 2022 as part of the platform’s annual infrastructure release”.
This requirement has been designated as a mandatory compliance requirement coming into effect in April 2023.