Real time payments might now limp into view by the end of February 2018, if banks' customers are lucky.Talk of a November debut for the New Payments Platform is well and truly buried, and today the NPP's 13 participants shuffle towards a revised timetable they can realistically meet.Commonwealth Bank and Westpac are the two big banks dragging the chain, making any debut before Christmas impractical.Today marks "an industry check point, before proceeding into the next and final phase of testing," Adrian Lovney, CEO of NPP Australia, told Banking Day.From here, there's semantic wrangling over where the NPP is at and when it may reach a "deferred date," the latter a colloquial expression of sector CEOs waiting for guidance on an actual date."After Australia Day," was the timing outlined by Lovney in an interview last week. This fits with ADI CEO chat that "no earlier than February" is the compromise being talked through - and assuming the two big bank laggards are finally prepared.On the other hand, the annual report of the Payments System Board, published on Thursday last week, stated that the NPP was "expected to commence operations around the end of 2017," adding a coda that "additional services [will] be rolled out in 2018 and beyond."Various informal target dates for the launch of the NPP and real time payments have been set and not met this year, including, at one point, a rollout even contemplated for July.The timeline eventually evolved into a debut slated for mid November, at least when Banking Day was last digging into this topic two months ago.Lovney, like the RBA, is employing language that confirms both this next year and next year as the date of an on-time arrival for a project in the planning since 2012, one with a combined budget of in excess of A$1 billion across the industry.Yesterday, Lovney said: "We expect the platform to go live in November 2017, followed by a period of live proving."This will include "'real transactions between a group of users in each of the banks and around 50 mutual banks, credit unions, and building societies," he said - all "before the platform opens up to the wider public."The opening-up of the platform to the public, Lovney said, "will therefore be a carefully-managed ramp-up of services, including PayID registration, which is a sensible way to introduce real-time payments in Australia, which mirrors the approach used on similar services in UK and Singapore."These plans, Lovney said, "need to take into consideration the traditional industry freeze which stretches through December and January, which means services will commence rolling out to the public after Australia Day."The board of NPP Australia will meet next week.If nothing else the months-late arrival of the NPP in 2018 is a hallmark of the even more dire straits into which the sector has sunk across the last year.As Banking Day wrote in the days before last Christmas: "It's real time payments in 2017 or a metaphoric whole of industry bust for the Australian banking sector."