Some banks want time, as long as 10 years, to adapt their core systems and prepare for any future collaboration on payments systems - a time-frame bound to encourage alternative payment providers in their own endeavours to carve out a share of one of the cornerstone products of Australia's banking industry.Submissions from banks and others to the Reserve Bank of Australia on the latter's review of innovation in the payments system provide an overview of the thinking of large banks and niche providers on their investment priorities, as well as their analysis of where the industry might be headed.One stark submission comes from National Australia Bank and pleads for time.After some boilerplate language about being "committed to innovation", NAB outlines its preference for the industry to hammer out "an 'in principle' road map of payment system innovation across a broader four to ten year horizon."This timeline, NAB wrote, "would facilitate… strategic planning and longer term capital and change forecasting."NAB's submission, sent under the name of David Gall, executive general manager, working capital services, makes it clear that the bank has little appetite for investment in cooperative payments projects in the short or medium term.For NAB, the priority is the overhaul of its own core systems."In the coming years [innovation] will be tempered, in the case of NAB and a number of other Australian financial institutions, with the large investment being made in core system replacements and [other] projects," the bank wrote.NAB attempted to make clear that it regarded the impediments as an industry issue."One of the key inhibitors we have identified regarding innovation is the ability to be able to deliver products in a timely manner to market," the bank wrote, an observation informed by the demise of the Mambo payments project by BPay last month (a project from which NAB was the first bank to withdraw).NAB may have Westpac in particular in mind in pointing to replacement of core systems. Westpac's own, short, submission to the RBA was silent on this point.Westpac did, however, focus on commercial issues for the RBA to consider in its submission.Chris Campbell, head of payments policy at Westpac, wrote that the RBA, through the Payments System Board, needed to "allow commercial arrangements to be set, without restriction, for collaborative ventures."Our view is that industry players will be materially better placed to settle on collaborative investments once there is clarity around what commercial arrangements will be sustainable."Commonwealth Bank also highlighted commercial considerations in its submission, which was lodged under the name of Stuart Woodward, general manager of representation."Rather than regulate or penalise payment providers for a perceived failure to innovate, the Reserve Bank should look to reward or incentivise payment providers for innovation. "Margins in payments are very thin and so regulating or forcing systemic upgrades can increase the cost to payment providers, and risks redirecting funds from true innovation," he wrote.And, in an echo of one of the debates that raged for years in the early 2000s, Woodward reminded the RBA that "we do