Eight days in banking

Ian Rogers
Post-uni in December 1988, I landed in Sydney fresh from university in Tasmania in need of work.

After two weeks of job search, a Centacom ad in the SMH produced a two week stint covering the last two weeks of December as a mail room gofer at Standard Chartered.

The job  was zipping key internal mail - much of it payments and reference data - around the bank and among counterparties.

This provided an introduction to the scattered bank offices of SCB a block or so east of Martin Place, where this late-arriving UK imperial bank intersected with the titans of the domestic banking scene. It counted Adelaide as HQ.

I had a bit of banking nut as a second year macro lecturer in 1985, arming me with some background to begin observing the industry in action.

In the afternoon my task was to race payments to other banks before cut-off, 4.30 pm, usually. Staff and managers worked to this deadline, and a cynic may wonder if the agency and bank erred in hiring this chap to scurry around town with trusted messages.

The brass got mad when one big bank or another unilaterally opted for a 3.30 pm cut off on a Friday - a banking industry version of the advance of newspaper deadlines, with reform of business practice proving the antithesis of progress.

I got mad when senior staff dithered, delaying the addition of their scrawl to a voucher held close since morning.

Standard Chartered daily risked delays and defaults in the reliability of its payments flows the way they did business. I inferred that it was a systemic industry problem.

Sydney office manager Bill Maxwell-Smith patiently each afternoon redrew the city map to help me get it right, but I made missteps and took time getting the landmarks lined up.

Presenting at the Westpac desk when aiming for NAB a few floors away was one mistake I repeated.
How much of this work flow startled me?

All of it really.

An outsider, banks were already, as far as I was concerned, computerised.
They'd managed Bankcard, ATMs and Eftpos, so network thinking was prevalent in the banking industry. But making payments more lively and framed to meet customer needs -  that work was in the future.

Flash a $30 million payment from Westpac to NAB? I don't think this was going on much among domestic banks in 1988, even though splendid models for cross border payments existed via SWIFT, albeit with a clunky user experience by modern standards.

SWIFT's IP was even then in the early phase of being adapted by Swiss banks for consumer real time payments in Switzerland, an arrangement that continues to this day.

One barrier in Australia to even considering use of this system was sky high costs, quite a multiple of today's SWIFT fee levels.

Change at least beckoned, with work for what became the real time gross settlements system for Australia advancing from the dreaming stage.

The journey of payments reform continues in Australia, dodgy temps no longer a weak link in the payments chain.

"RTGS for everybody" is one way to think about the New Payments Platform, RBA NPP chief David Brown pitched at the SWIFT's Sibos exhibition in Singapore in September.

APCA, Cuscal, RBA, SWIFT and Westpac fronted a panel one morning at Sibos. It was a positive pitch from the national champions, explaining the path taken in Australia toward faster payments. The five fielded questions of informed interest from the global industry.

No one paused to reflect on the wait endured by Australia for payments reform.

The RBA took the best part of fifteen years to convert policy zeal on the topic into social reform and demand action from the Australian banking industry.

The NPP will be a creature of its time, Australian payments reformers in parochial clothing doing a degree of original building for the national New Payments Platform.

SWIFT is the key contractor alongside Fiserv and the reuse of many key platform elements - compliance functions prominent - is pretty core to the solution, now due in a year.