Australia's new payments platform is entering its final testing stages aiming to go live in the final quarter of this year. Korea and Japan took their own real time payment systems live some time ago and Singapore is not far away."The intention is to finish testing in August this year and to start the service in October," said Franck de Praetere, the NPP business programme manager for SWIFT in Australia.But far from being a rather gimmicky real-time platform for small person-to-person payments as was first envisaged by the RBA back in 2012, the NPP promises much greater functionality than the ability to make and receive low value real time payments outside of normal banking hours by the end of 2017.Speaking yesterday in Sydney at a briefing organised by fund management software vendors Calastone, de Praetere reminded the attendees - mostly fund managers - that a second aim was to create a system giving businesses much richer information in support of real-time payments."The banks like the fact that we are owned by the banks and we have been doing security for more than 30 years," said de Praetere.Rather than having some payments take up to five days to be processed, as they do now, the NPP is aiming for close to real time: five or six seconds. And currently any text surrounding payments is limited to 18 characters; the NPP will allow 280 characters to be used. The bar will be set very high for payments of single credit transfers, with the system designed to run with 99.999 per cent availability and no single outage greater than two minutes per month.