Money never sleeps: Australia's bet on always-on finance

Citi’s Head of Payments for Australia and New Zealand, Ajin Krishnan, argues that Australia proves real-time payments are infrastructure, not a feature, and the world hasn't caught up yet.

What global payment leaders can learn from Australia’s real-time transformation

For decades, payments innovation has focused on delivering speed via faster settlement, shorter clearing windows and reduced friction at point-of-sale. Yet Australia’s experience suggests something more profound is at work. Speed remains undeniably critical, but in addition to a growing expectation for real-time payments, there is also a rapid shift towards data-rich, always-on payment ecosystems that put the customer’s convenience and safety at the forefront.

For global payment leaders navigating their own transformations, Australia’s payment landscape offers three lessons.

1. Customer control is the new currency of trust

Australia’s payments transformation places the customer not at the edge of the system, but firmly at its centre. Nowhere is this clearer than in PayTo, the next-generation account-to-account payment capability built on the New Payments Platform (NPP).

PayTo allows customers to authorise, view and manage payment agreements directly within their banking app—giving them real-time visibility into who can debit their account and under what terms. This is a departure from traditional direct debits over the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS, the legacy low-value clearing system in Australia). While some markets, such as India, have had sophisticated instant collections capability available for a few years now, Australia is certainly among the early adopters of this functionality.

The implications are significant. Customers can see exactly who is authorised to debit their account and under what conditions. Changes that once took days or weeks can be actioned near instantly. Uncertainty about upcoming payments is replaced by clarity.

This new level of transparency is reinforced by Australia’s data-rich approach. The NPP supports ISO 20022 messaging, enabling better contextual information. Additionally, PayID reduces misdirected payments, and emerging name-matching tools offer Confirmation of Payee-style protection that significantly reduces scam and error risk.

The result is a trust dividend—not just faster payments, but safer, more predictable, more controllable payments.

And customer adoption reflects this confidence. Many large merchants who collect from retail consumers have announced the inclusion of PayTo among their collection capabilities over the last two years. Partly aided by innovations such as PayTo, NPP volumes reached roughly 1.8 billion annual transactions by late 2025, up nearly 14% year on year. This degree of scale suggests that real-time adoption is driven not simply by speed, but by customer empowerment. 

2. Real-time payments should be viewed by businesses as a balance-sheet technology

If customer value is the first lesson, enterprise value is the second. Australia’s experience demonstrates that real-time payments are not merely a convenience layer for consumers; they are a working-capital engine for businesses.

Instant settlement can fundamentally alter cash-flow dynamics. Liquidity planning becomes more precise. Order-to-cash cycles can compress. Float can shrink, along with the operational and credit risks it creates. Rich remittance data enables more efficient reconciliation. These are not marginal gains. For many organisations, they reshape day-to-day operating rhythms. As a heavily carded market with card settlement cycles of one to two days, cash-flow efficiencies of real-time settlements could be material for businesses once there is significant adoption. 
NPP’s real-time capabilities—processing billions of dollars daily with 24x7 availability—are designed for this operational uplift.  

The impact becomes even more pronounced when real-time capabilities extend across borders. Australia’s NPP International Payments Service (IPS) has begun enabling near-instant processing of inbound cross-border payments, proving that real-time capabilities can transcend national boundaries.

This is already being realised at scale through global banking platforms. Citi’s clients around the world can settle cross-border payments in Australian dollars instantly into Australia, leveraging the NPP’s real-time infrastructure. What was once a multi-day, correspondent-heavy process is now collapsed into immediate, final settlement—directly improving liquidity positions and reducing trapped cash across multinational structures.

For treasurers and CFOs, the implications can be profound. Immediate finality reduces uncertainty, strengthens intraday liquidity management and supports always-on funding models. For marketplaces, gig-economy platforms and travel providers, real-time disbursements become a competitive differentiator rather than an operational aspiration.

Citi’s global analysis supports this. Real Time: 24x7 Finance in an Always On World shows that enterprises adopting always-on liquidity and automation models will enjoy meaningful operational and strategic benefits—while those that lag will face widening efficiency and customer experience gaps. While a number of countries around the world have real-time payments, Australia is among a handful of pioneers pushing into further innovation through real-time collections and real-time cross-border payments.  

3. Regulation can be an accelerant, not an obstacle

The third lesson concerns regulation. Australia’s payments evolution underscores that a forward-looking regulatory framework can actively enable innovation rather than constrain it.

Australia’s payments regulatory overhaul has had an immediate and practical impact on the payments environment. Key recent reforms include:

• A technology-neutral, activity-based licensing framework is expected to capture digital wallets, BNPL providers and crypto payment facilitators, creating consistency across a modern ecosystem. 
• The planned retirement of BECS, although now without a fixed end date, has sent a clear signal: modernised platforms are the key to the future.
• AML/CTF reforms introducing a new “value transfer chain” require richer data to accompany payments from originator to beneficiary—something legacy systems struggle to support. 

Australia’s regulatory posture demonstrates that innovation and risk mitigation can advance together. Real-time rails don’t just move money faster—they can move smarter, carrying richer data to detect scams and other criminal activity, support sanctions screening, and meet global information sharing standards.

These reforms have had an immediate, practical impact. For example, with the upcoming Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing (AML/CFT) reforms—specifically the enhanced "Travel Rule" obligations that went live on 31 March 2026—institutions are facing significantly stricter requirements for payment transparency. These reforms mandate that comprehensive originator and beneficiary information must be collected and transmitted with financial transactions to allow for more effective screening and compliance. As legacy payment systems like BECS lack the capability to carry rich data, institutions are actively diverting domestic legs of cross-border flows from BECS to modern alternatives like NPP IPS.

A case study in payment system modernisation

Australia’s journey in developing its real-time payment system offers a significant case study for the global financial sector. When advancements in customer functionality are aligned with a supportive regulatory framework and a willingness from industry participants to invest in complex new technologies, the result can be a fundamental shift rather than merely incremental progress.

What sets Australia's initiative apart is the treatment of payments as a core piece of financial infrastructure, rather than a standalone utility. This approach has the potential to improve efficiency and resilience across the economy.

For payment leaders globally, Australia's system represents a functioning, large-scale example of a modern real-time payment ecosystem. It also presents a significant opportunity, and companies like Citi are investing heavily in our platforms to innovate in this environment.

However, the journey is not yet complete. The market is still working to drive widespread customer adoption, and there is still some distance to go before these innovations become ubiquitous. A key example here is PayTo, where Citi is enabling merchants, helping drive up adoption rates, and sharing best practices from markets that have already scaled globally. Nevertheless, the Australian payments ecosystem and its evolution serve as a practical reference point, encouraging institutions to consider the pace of their own transformations and their role in the future of payments.

About Ajin Krishnan

Ajin Krishnan has been working in banking for almost two decades and has experience in product and stakeholder management, regulatory change management, business strategy, and client solutioning. Currently, as Citi’s Head of Payments for Australia and New Zealand, he leads a team responsible for domestic and cross-border payments, commercial cards, and acquiring. He is passionate about the ongoing digital transformation in the financial services industry.

 

About Citi

Citi is a preeminent banking partner for institutions with cross-border needs, a global leader in wealth management and a valued personal bank in its home market of the United States. Citi does business in more than 180 countries and jurisdictions, providing corporations, governments, investors, institutions and individuals with a broad range of financial products and services.