Brought to account

Real time payments will stop banking delays and make business more efficient, writes Sophie Elsworth

BANKING customers will soon be able to farewell painful payment delays as money transferred to another person’s account will appear within a matter of seconds.

Getting a customer’s payment details, including a BSB and account number, will no longer be required and instead a person’s phone number or email address will be enough to transfer cash.

And anyone making excuses as to why a payment hasn’t happened, or declaring money is on its way, will be caught lying.

The New Payments Platform is due to arrive in February after four years in the making and it will drastically speed up transactions.

It will allow customers to send and receive money 24 hours, seven days a week and 365 days a year, regardless of who customers bank with.

NPP chief executive officer Adrian Lovney said the transition to the faster payments platform is long overdue in Australia.

“Once the system goes live, one of the first things people will see is they will be offered the opportunity to create a PayID,’’ he said.

“Here people can use their mobile number, home phone number or email address or if they are a business they could use their ABN or ACN.”

The Pay ID is a critical piece of information – it allows customers to link a phone number, email address or ABN to their financial account – and this PayID can be shared, replacing BSB and account number details.

Customers will be able to register their PayID through their bank and when using it to transfer money, if they enter a person’s mobile phone number or email linked to their account their name will pop up.

But you can still use a BSB and account number to make transactions.

ANZ has found some transactions under the New Payments Platform have been completed in as little as 10 seconds.

They have even test driven the platform to load 50 separate payments a second, which they forecast to be its traffic load once the NPP begins.

Strategic relations firm RFi’s Australian research director Alex Boorman said the payment technology will bring Australians into line with other markets worldwide.

He said banking users will have the 18-characters allowed for a payment description to be increased to 280 characters.

The first service to offer the instant payments will be “Osko”, owned by BPay, allowing customers to send and receive payments through their PayID.

Mr Lovney said the new payments platform is “incredibly secure so that it can’t be attacked or hacked”.

“If I know your PayID I can’t get money out of your bank account; you still have to authorise a payment and push it to me,’’ he said.