Bpay to build the NPP's first overlay
Bill payments provider Bpay has won the tender to supply the first overlay service for the New Payments Platform.Bpay is planning a service that will allow consumers to make real-time payments to a recipient's mobile phone or email.The New Payments Platform was launched in 2013 with the task of developing payments infrastructure that would allow for data-rich, real-time payments. The NPP is building the core infrastructure and leaving the development of service overlays to the market. However it decided to commission an "initial convenience service" to test the capabilities of the infrastructure and build momentum.Bpay chief executive John Banfield said the company's overlay would be ready when the NPP goes live in 2017.Several years ago Bpay was managing the ill-fated Mambo project, a smaller scale version of the NPP backed by Bpay's owners, the big banks.Although Mambo was abandoned, Banfield said Bpay took a number of important lessons from the project."The decision to separate infrastructure from services was something that came out of Mambo," he said.The Bpay service will allow consumers to use a mobile phone number, an email address, a company identifier or a bank BSB as the destination for a payment.Banks using the service will have to agree to make payments available in near real-time.In its first iteration the service will allow for a 280 character message to be sent with a payment. Banfield said future development of the service would include the attachment of documents with payments.The service will be distributed through financial institutions in the same way Bpay and Bpay View are now. All of the 12 financial institutions participating in the NPP development will offer the Bpay payment service.