Westpac won't be there on day one when the New Payments Platform rolls into view, in November 2017 under current scenarios. Thus, also missing will be St George, BankSA and allied brands.Five key bank brands absent cannot be an encouraging start for real time payments and the NPP in Australia."We're ready to go live," Emma Cunningham, head of communications for Westpac Institutional Bank said when asked last night, going on to diss "conspiracy theories."Chris Joye, in a long reflection on ANZ at the AFR.com website on Friday dropped the line that "a Sydney-based bank is dragging the chain, its rivals are happy to move on without it."Westpac is the big bank in the outer, or so Banking Day hears.The board of NPP Australia, in a recent flash of valour, held to a November debut for real time payments and fobbed off Westpac overtures to look into a delay. A champagne day for real time payments in time for Christmas, if no others drag the chain, puts every other big bank along with eight more participants on target.A presentation by Westpac for its WIB division on Friday aired little colour on the NPP project at the bank, a slide stating it was "investing alongside NPP to deliver improved transaction capability".In an email, Westpac's adviser Cunningham reiterated "your claim is not correct. We can confirm Westpac is on track for the agreed industry 'go live'."Since the beginning of this project, we have made significant investments in people and resources to ensure the success of this new payments infrastructure for our customers and the industry."Adrian Lovney, chief executive of NPP Australia, supplied some context."This week we had a board meeting that received reports on the considerable progress we are making through a comprehensive industry testing program.  We've still more testing to complete but we're on track for a ramp-up of the central infrastructure commencing from November 2017," he wrote."From that point, individual participants each have their own timeline for launching services to their customers in different ways at different times," Lovney said, a line we thought we'd hear in connection with 'No-name credit union' around the NPP rather than Westpac.Lovney added: "This means that services enabled by the NPP will begin to roll out from the end of the year initially and into 2018.   "As we move into 2018 the number of reachable accounts will increase as more financial institutions join the platform."There are 13 participants in the NPP. Most banks will "connect to the NPP infrastructure as an Identified Institution, through one of the participants," its website explains.