New Payments Platform triggers $3bn banktech upgrades

Australia's banks will spend A$3 billion updating their payments systems over the next three years. There's plenty of scope for this, as they fend off payment disruptors and prepare for the advent of the New Payments Platform due to go live in late 2017.

According to Mitch Green, principal of payments for HCL Australia Services (the local arm of Indian tech giant HCL Technologies) the NPP, although still at a very early phase in its development, has the potential to "be a real game changer especially for medium and small businesses."

The banks, he said, were scurrying to review their payments infrastructures to ensure that they can co-exist with the NPP. Green said this would require 24-hour operations and support by the major banks, along with real time core banking platforms able to clear funds directly into accounts rather than relying on legacy batch processing systems.

Green also noted that the banks were being forced to overhaul their fraud, risk and anti-money laundering platforms to ensure they were able to withstand real time settlement. He said that when the UK's Faster Payments system had been deployed at least one major institution found its fraud tracking systems were unable to keep pace and was the victim of a serious fraud problem.

Green declined to name the institution but warned that; "The NPP will settle and clear on a line by line basis, and will be non-repudiable. You have got to have real time fraud detection."

However, he acknowledged that the sector was still playing a waiting game until the release of the "rule book" setting  out how the NPP will operate and detail any transaction limits that may apply.

While some basics are already known - the platform will be built using the ISO 20022 standard, for example - Green said that banks were not expecting to have much more information to work with until the end of the year, but noted that many were already reviewing their payments architecture "to see if it is capable of supporting the NPP."

Simultaneously, he said, banks were also looking at Ripple, the trust based online settlement system which recently set up shop in Australia. Green said Ripple had the potential to be "quite a disruptor. I really quite like what they are doing."

He declined to say whether HCL was working with any Australian financial institutions on Ripple deployments, but said, "I would be very surprised if not every single large institution in Australia is looking at it."