Credit unions, building societies and mutual banks look to be the champions of the day, as Australia's New Payments Platform made an uneasy debut first thing Tuesday morning.
Three out of four big banks showed they were not ready for the NPP's big day yesterday, while in some cases promoting mischievous media messaging that they were.
These banks - ANZ, NAB and Westpac - together dismayed their customers and dashed the hopes at NPP Australia and the Reserve Bank that yesterday would become an iconic day for real time payments and Australian banking.
Westpac confirmed it was barely involved in the NPP at this early point, while National Australia Bank encouraged questions over the depth of its own engagement. ANZ, as it had said, has deferred the launch of the NPP for its customers by weeks or longer.
Commonwealth Bank launched for its main brand customers only.
This achievement makes CBA the only almost clean skin among the big banks that were so centrally involved in making the NPP a working platform.
Philip Lowe, governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, yesterday pushed out some confident and optimistic lines on the economic importance of the NPP.
"The public launch of the NPP represents the delivery of a major piece of national infrastructure. I would like to thank everyone who has been involved in the NPP project and I look forward to the payment innovations it will make possible and the benefits this will generate for all Australians," Lowe said.
"Around 60 banks, credit unions and building societies will begin rolling out services to their customers from today," Lowe said, possibly overstating the numbers.
New Payments Platform Australia, the entity at the centre of this four-year long project, has estimated that four out of five Australian bank accounts will be able to accept NPP payments within a few weeks of launch.
As events on day one showed, nowhere near 80 per cent of bank accounts are yet in reach. Far, far fewer than 50 per cent of accounts look to be in reach so far, given the discordant debut in the NPP by NAB, Westpac and ANZ.
"The industry is delivering on the key strategic objectives," Lowe (who also heads the Payments System Board) insisted.
Banking Day heard a range of early and warm accounts yesterday from some banks on the NPP's debut. These were soon offset by reading plenty of angst on social media and the sceptical commentary on specialist technology media platforms, with numerous voices helping to sort through myth and reality around big banks and the real time payments.
"Westpac joins the real time payment revolution" was the cocky headline for the bank's main media release yesterday on the NPP.
Westpac customers "will benefit from 24/7 real time payments with the introduction of the New Payments Platform (NPP), which will launch to the public from today," the bank said, before owning up to the disappointments on its readiness.
"Westpac consumer customers will be the first to experience the real time payment capability" it continued. But this promise applies to nowhere near all customers of the Westpac main brand.
In Westpac's case, the NPP roll out "starts with a small group before gradually opening up the platform to all eligible Westpac consumer customers followed by our Business, Institutional and Government customers," Di Challenor, Westpac's general manager for global transaction services, said in the statement.
Challenor added that "the roll-out will progressively flow to St George, BankSA and Bank of Melbourne," this final list of exceptions from Westpac's part in the NPP being already well known.
Philip Joyce, a member of the board of NPPA (and the Westpac managing director for global transaction services) provided a curious summary of the industry's state of play in an interview with Westpac Wire, an in-house news portal.
"All four majors are here today at launch, which is great," Joyce said, a summary contradicted within hours.
Joyce did add a qualifier, to defend the bank's staged engagement with the NPP.
"A great customer experience is paramount," he said at the same time as the Westpac Twitter feed repeated supplied lines on "a phased rollout."
Over at NAB, gripes soon took over the bank's Twitter feed over the contestable instructions (from NAB on Twitter, most directly, though with a more diffident tone on PayID and NPP availability at the bank's website).
One senior banker at NAB clarified via a report in IT News that the bank planned a staged roll out as well.
IT News reported that Rachel Slade, NAB's head of deposits and transaction services, had said NAB would roll out NPP features to its customers "within the next month".
Finder.com.au, a comparison website, informed its readers late yesterday that NAB was "not yet" part of the NPP, but "will be staging the rollout in coming week." Finder used identical language for its summary on where Westpac was at.
One key banking name, ANZ, makes it a trifecta of industry titans being uninvolved, in any meaningful manner, in the supply of NPP services from the outset. This trio have ensured that Tuesday 13th February, selected only late last week by the board of the NPPA as the day that defines the beginnings of the NPP, was memorable only in a pejorative sense.
ANZ had for more than a week advised this news service that it would join in with PayID and the NPP "in the coming weeks". In the end this turned out to be true, making ANZ the only no show of the four major bank brands.
"Our NPP capability has been live and operating successfully with the industry since November 2017 and we will be launching a pilot with staff soon," an ANZ media adviser wrote in an email.
"This approach allows us to continue the rigorous testing necessary."
The embarrassment of Australia's second, third and fourth largest banks has one counterpoint, since Commonwealth Bank looks to have emerged with the cleanest bill of health on the NPP launch day.
"Yes, CommBank has launched to customers," was Finder's assessment on the industry leader's entry into the NPP.
Even so, CBA decided to leave Bankwest customers out of its NPP and PayID launch.
"We'll be launching in the coming months ... we're taking some extra time," Bankwest advised impatient users on Twitter.
HSBC Bank Australia and Macquarie Bank - two more banks that were alongside ANZ as one of 13 original "participants" in the build of the NPP - yesterday declined requests to explain their approach to catching up with the pioneers of this new payments service.
Citibank, yet of another of the 13 that paid for the NPP and its testing all through the summer, is also not among the first wave of banks.
"Implementation of NPP is part of Citi's global faster payments strategy, and roll out will commence from the second half of 2018. We will provide more details on timing and service availability as we get closer to this date," the bank told customers at its website.