Heritage Bank, the largest mutual bank in the country, has been scrambling to join its peers and provide access for its customers to the New Payments Platform.The bank's CEO Peter Lock has put a positive spin on the situation. He told Banking Day that the tardy response to the February 2018 start of the New Payments Platform by some of the majors has allowed his bank to catch up, and he reckons very few of his customers noticed their bank was among the laggards."We had scoped out our approach to the NPP and, quite frankly, we were let down by one of our major suppliers that we had engaged to deliver it for us," he said. "This put us in the position of having to do it ourselves, which wasn't our intention."Lock said that, far from being a disaster, being forced to play catch-up has been unexpectedly helpful for his IT team in managing the rest of its digital upgrade. "We had help from a company called Redhat in redesigning our workforce planning model, and adopting Agile methodology. We managed to deliver a minimum viable product for the NPP in 12 weeks," Lock said."Normally that would have taken two years under the old model."Lock sees a further benefit to being a late arrival: once all the Big Four really are ready to roll, they will push the NPP again via another major ad campaign, which will suit Heritage as they will also tag along."We haven't been disadvantaged as some of the major banks have also been dragging the chain on their NPP, and there's been no dramatic uptake of the new payment platform yet.""We expect that [situation] to change towards the end of this year or the beginning of next year as all the majors come on board and the marketing dollars start to flow.""We are looking at an early October start date.Lock said that his bank's new payment platform system is being built by an in-house team, has met the accreditation requirements of NPPA.