Customers of Bankwest, Bank of Melbourne, BankSA and St George are among those bank brands that will not be involved in the first wave of the mass market invited to sign up for PayID and able make to make real time payments in Australia.
The bulk of the customer base of Commonwealth Bank (owner of Bankwest) and Westpac (the owner of the remaining three) will be part of the first wave, as soon as the New Payments Platform is finally thrown open for use. ANZ and NAB customers are also in the first wave.
That elusive date remains under discussion. Banking Day late last week
flagged 14 February as one launch date mentioned by industry executives for a project where previous launch dates have been set and missed over the last nine months. Another possible NPP launch date is next Friday, the 16th of February.
"An announcement will be made soon," a spokesperson for NPP Australia wrote in an email.
"The board will confirm the decision to launch - a formality of the program's governance - but until this happens, a date cannot be confirmed."
There may now be "more than 60 diverse financial institutions" offering services from the platform to their customers," the spokesperson added.
Diverse is not a word you would choose to describe the quartet of Bankwest, Bank of Melbourne, BankSA and St George. Three of these - St George, BankSA and BOM - represent more than one third of the entire consumer base of Westpac, based on a Roy Morgan Research estimate.
Banking Day reported a number of times in August and September 2017 and later on the lack of clarity on the progress of Westpac and Commonwealth in preparing to move in step with the wider industry to make real time payments a reality.
In a long email responding to
Stop and go for NPP romantics, the lead article in Banking Day on Thursday, the NPP disputed the framework used to report on the state of play for this landmark industry reform.
"There has never been an 'instant switch-on of ubiquitous reach' planned. Whoever is fuelling this speculation is doing so from a misinformed place or creating mischief," the NPP said.
"Some banks will be joining from day one, others have decided to join at a later date. There is no race. There are no laggards. What determines these timings is an individual participant's own preferences and plans.
"Articles that speculate about time-pressures, laggards, and races are not at all appropriate for a project of this significance and complexity," the NPP argued.
"The platform went live in November last year. From that point employees at participating banks have been sending payments to each other over the industry moratorium period, which prevents changes of this scale being made to banking systems."
The question asked by more than just journalists in industry media is: when will this finally be up and running? And that is a question NPP Australia has no real answer for.
"In terms of a launch date, I'm unable to provide you this for governance reasons," the spokesperson wrote.
"But we're on track, and once the platform launches, participating banks, building societies and credit unions will commence rolling out their services based on their own timings and needs.
"Some will be directly connected ADIs, others will be institutions who will connect to the platform via one of the directly connected ADIs. We expect that within a few weeks after the launch, about four in five accounts will be reachable.
"Once the platform launches, PayID will also become available.
"This means that currently PayIDs cannot be created or registered, until the platform launches and participants start to introduce it to their customers, again, in line with their own timings.
"When it launches, an industry funded PayID campaign will commence as well as participants own marketing, some of which has already commenced."