Australia's central bank urges banks to update online payments tech

In a speech, the Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) head of payments policy said some major banks had recently indicated they would be unable to meet a commitment to launch a new PayTo system for direct debits by July 2022. ‘Given this, the Governor (Philip Lowe) has written to the CEOs of the relevant banks to seek assurance that they will be ready to launch PayTo by no later than April 2023’, declared the aforementioned source.

The new systems are intended as an upgrade to the New Payments Platform (NPP), a major modernisation of Australia's real-time payments system which the RBA has been leading since 2012. There are now 107 financial institutions offering NPP payment services for almost 90 million customer accounts, including Australia's four major domestic banks. Over the past year, the NPP processed more than a billion transactions, worth more than AUD 1 trillion (USD 705 billion).

The RBA is also pressing banks to adopt a new international payments business service which will enable the Australian dollar leg of inbound cross-border payments to be processed by the NPP. The system would allow additional data about the sender to be provided, making it easier for banks to meet their compliance obligations related to financial crime, the same source said.