It is eight months since the launch of the new payments platform has been up, and nearly a year since the pilot program began.
Some of the major banks and the central bank are now looking at expanding uses of the New Payments Platform beyond peer-to-peer transfers of small amounts, a panel discussion at the Sibos conference heard.
Adrian Lovney, chief executive officer of NPP Australia, the entity running the new payments platform, explained there are eight organisations directly connected to the NPP with another 70 to 75 entities connected to the platform via those eight. More are in the process of joining up.
Lovney also pointed out that unlike the UK system that it is often compared to, Australia's NPP is capable of including far more information with each transaction, and has a much higher limit on amounts that can be transferred.
To date, the largest single transaction via the NPP has been A$17 million, and the platform has carried a total of $40 billion as at 16 October (and NOT the mere $40 million that we reported yesterday).
Rachel Slade, Chief Customer Experience Officer at National Australia Bank can clearly see how the NPP services can be expanded.
Echoing the comments on the opening day by Shayne Elliott, ANZ's chief executive, Slade said "we were all focused on a big complex implementation, and maybe overlooked setting [services] that were best for our business clients."
Now that NAB has had a chance to see the NPP in action for most of 2018, she suggested some examples of emerging use cases. Slade said one of her bank's business customers is an employer in the gig economy, and was looking at paying workers at the end of a shift - that is, more often than once a day.
Disaster payments was another example of how the NPP could be used, saving bank representatives the trouble of travelling out to deliver prepaid credit cards.
This concept was backed up by Lindsay Boulton, RBA assistant governor. He said there were government departments that would be very interested in using the NPP for a range of payments. "The government makes about 2000 emergency payments a day across the country to people in distress," he said.
The ability of the NPP to include documentation with payments is also likely to be useful in that context.
Di Challenor, general manager of global transaction services at Westpac, said her team was keen to explore how the movement of money instantaneously helps people to do more business.
"We are looking to use NPP to unlock liquidity for corporate treasurers, to set up a digital institutional bank.
"Thinking about liquidity and faster payments, for a treasurer, is really critical."
Single touch payroll is another area that is being examined by the big banks for their business customers, removing the need to run this as an overnight batch processing task.