The banking industry's somewhat mysterious "Mambo" project may cover a lot of territory and address a range of customer frustrations - assuming banks can work out a business case, agree on the required investment and navigate any trades practices issues created by yet more industry cooperation.Submissions by ANZ and Commonwealth banks to the Reserve Bank of Australia in connection with the current review of payments regulations provides the first outline, in any public document, of what banks have in mind.The Mambo concept would "interconnect banks, organisations and consumers", ANZ wrote, "using new electronic addressing capability". This capability, based on earlier reports and not ANZ's submission, appears to be a variant or extension of the current BPay framework of unique biller codes for each merchant and a related account number that the merchant allocates to their customers.This mooted service, ANZ said, "would support a range of functionalities including invoicing/billing, overdue reminders, making payments, and exchanging non-value items between parties such as notification of payments made, documentation and other information relating to payments made."The capabilities would be available for consumer to business, business to consumer, consumer to consumer and business to business payments."Commonwealth Bank described the project as a "new online payment services through BPay, outside the Eftpos system".CBA said the work on the project, while in its early stages, was approaching the point of business-case assessment. The bank said measurable progress towards implementation should be achieved by August 2009. One context for ANZ and CBA referring to this project is that they (and other banks) aim to shift the thinking of the RBA in relation to the merit of banks investing in Eftpos to make that payment scheme work more effectively online.In effect the two banks are saying that other innovations within the banking sector are overtaking Eftpos, and so there's not much of a case for the RBA, as regulator, to fret about any lack of investment in a payment mechanism that is a quarter of a century old and being overtaken by other product offers.BPay is coordinating the banks' discussions about Mambo.The Sheet asked BPay's general manager, Andrew Arnott, to shed more light on the project yesterday but he declined.