News

The New Payments Platform – is your bank talking to you about it?

The New Payments Platform (NPP) expected to be launched early in 2018 will revolutionise the Australian payments landscape.

Instead of waiting hours or days for money to clear between banks, customers will be able to almost instantaneously access their transferred funds no matter what time of day or which bank the transfer came from.

So what are some of the benefits of the NPP?

Speed and availability

• Faster funds availability
• 24/7 real-time gross settlement with no “cut-off” times
• Account to account payment

Smart addressing

• Customers can use simple, easy to remember addresses to direct payments using the PayID Addressing Service

Richer payment information

• More information with a payment
• Information can be embedded into payment messages or links to externally hosted documents

Workflow

• Myriad different events or triggers
• Can be one to many or many to one

This will have an enormous impact on the way individuals and businesses handle their finances, in particular their cashflow operating cycles.

Consider the following implications to find out if your business is ready for the NPP launch:

• The inflow and outflow of funds out of bank accounts will be a lot quicker. Are your middle and back office systems and staff ready for the change which may mean real time processing of reconciliations, etc.?
• There is the possibility of intra-day “spikes” in cashflow which may not be possible with the current banking facility limits – do you have any enough headroom in your transactional facilities if this occurs?
• How will the NPP assist with the customer experience that your business is trying to achieve?
• How will you use the data generated by using NPP to your business advantage?

Your relationship manager should be talking to you about how the NPP will impact your business and how you can use it for maximum advantage.

For further information, please refer to the NPP website (http://www.nppa.com.au/) or talk to your bank about its implications for your business.